In Spite of Thunder (9 page)

“Why so?”

“Because it will prevent something unpleasant,” replied Desmond Ferrier. “It will prevent my dear wife from poisoning Miss Page, from poisoning herself, or from poisoning me.”

“Sir, you are not—?”

“Not serious? You say that too? My dear Dr. Fell! My formidable old King Cole! Stand where you are. Stand just where you are, here at the foot of the stairs!”

The lumbering footsteps ceased. The stub of a still-lighted cigarette, flicked hard between thumb and second finger, sailed out from under the archway and lay burning in the middle of the bar floor.

“My dear wife firmly believes I have got my eye on Audrey Page; and, what is worse, that Audrey Page has got her eye on me rather than Phil. Perhaps with a view to divorce and then matrimony to follow.”

Here the actor ruminated. Brian, looking past the side of the partition, could see him lifting his eyebrows and pointing a long forefinger at Dr. Fell.

“The first part, mind you,” he added, “is not so bloody silly as some of my dear wife’s ideas. The girl is very bedworthy. Strictly between ourselves, I shouldn’t mind a bash. But I suppose the decencies must be preserved towards one’s son’s fiancée; she has money, and Phil needs that; finally, my dear wife’s jealousy of any woman and all women has reached the point where all I want is some degree of peace and quiet.”

“H’m,” said Dr. Fell.

“You don’t believe that?”

“Sir, I am waiting.”

A fluid grin flashed in the semi-darkness beyond the arch.

“Then take the three possibilities in reverse order. One: Eve will poison me. That is as may be; that is with Allah; I can take care of myself. Two; Eve will poison herself.”

“Harrumph. And how likely is that?”

“It’s possible; my dear wife has threatened it often enough. But I can’t see her doing it unless she finds a way of putting the blame on Audrey Page.”

The band upstairs began a lively dance-tune. Audrey, as white as a ghost, flung herself across the table and seized Brian’s arms as he was about to jump up. The ashtray slid across to the edge.

“Three!” continued Desmond Ferrier. “Three: she will kill Audrey Page. To be quite candid, I don’t see that happening either. But it might.”

“Oh, ah. And my role in this?”

“Whatever my dear wife may be up to,” the other said with great clarity, “find out what it is and stop her. You saw Eve’s pathological state today. She ended by carrying vitriol in a perfume-bottle this evening, as I’ve just told you. Either you or Phil has been close to the Page girl all evening; I’ve arranged it so. But this can’t go on forever.”

“My good sir, need it go on at all? Surely it would be simpler to warn Miss Page and send her home?”

“I had thought of doing that tonight. I had meant to warn her. But do I wreck Phil’s marriage when my dear wife may only be bluffing?”

All the mockery fell away from Desmond Ferrier’s tone.

“Eve and I are broke, Dr. Fell. My dear wife thinks she can return to the stage in triumph. She can’t; she is finished. I myself am in no enviable position after years of retirement. The courage fails and the bones soften. I have things on my mind, believe me, which you would not find pleasant to think about.”

“Sir,” answered Dr. Fell, “I do not doubt it.”

“Meaning what?”

The discarded cigarette had burnt itself away on the floor. There was a long, rumbling sniff from Dr. Fell’s nose. Suddenly he loomed up huge beyond the partition which shielded Brian and Audrey from view.

Intent, back turned, muttering to himself, Dr. Fell lumbered towards the door at the front of the oblong bar. He had reached out one hand for the knob, shaking his crutch-headed stick in the other, when Desmond Ferrier moved after him.

“Yes, magister?” the latter inquired. “Do you care to state an opinion?”

Dr. Fell fumbled and bumbled at the door, having to set both leaves of it wide open on the street. Afterwards he wheeled round, face red and chins high.

“My mind, sir, is at present so clouded with facts as to be nearly useless. However, regarding Miss Page: does your son know what happened at Berchtesgaden seventeen years ago?”

“Up to tonight he didn’t. Eve and I have been too careful. But I told you: with all these people unexpectedly in town, Gerald Hathaway and my dearest Catford and a chap named Innes, he certainly knows now. I don’t doubt the Page girl knows too.”

“Oh, ah. Yes. We may be sure of it.”

“Answer me, magister! Shake not thy gory locks at me!”

“Answer you as to what?”

His back turned, oblivious of Audrey or Brian in the corner, Ferrier made a gesture of cynical self-ridicule.

“Let’s have a little honesty, shall we? I can play a picturesque character-part with the best of ’em. Fortunately most people don’t know a character-part is the easiest of all to play. But I’m no hero of the big bow-wow, unless it can be useful in getting a woman down to business; I’m a family man gone sour; I’ve got a bastard of a conscience and it worries me.” The deep voice changed. “Did I make a mistake by not warning the little Page girl?”

“Possibly not.”

“Possibly?”

“In my humble opinion, at least, Miss Page is in no danger. But, by thunder! It may be very necessary to warn someone else.”

“Oh? To warn whom?”

Dr. Fell spoke a name, and nobody heard it. It was lost as he shouldered out into the Place Neuve, under the shadow of those bastions which once supported the fortress-walls of Geneva. Desmond Ferrier followed him. The leaves of the door swung creakily in a rising wind.

For perhaps ten seconds after they had gone Audrey sat motionless, with so curious a shining in her eyes that Brian was both puzzled and alarmed.

In the next moment Audrey slid her knees out from under the table and ran to the door. There she stood looking out, as though deliberately hiding her face. He hurried after her.

“Well, well!” Audrey whispered. “Who was it, my dear?
Who
have they got to warn?”

“I didn’t hear. Any more than you. It can’t make any difference to you, can it?”

“No; but—”

“How much does it take to convince you? You’re not still thinking of joining their merry party, are you? Or do I have to sit up all night at your hotel and guard you until you take the plane?”

“No. No, cross my heart! You don’t have to do that.”

“If you’re lying to me again …!”

She turned round in a pallor of earnestness, eyes raised.

“Oh, Brian, do you imagine I’m absolutely silly? There isn’t anything on earth that could make me go. I’ll do what you want me to. I’ll be good. I’ll take the first place I can get on a plane for London, whether it’s tomorrow morning or later. I promise.”

Audrey did not keep her promise.

These events took place on the night of Thursday, August 9. At eight o’clock on the following morning, when Brian had got less than four hours’ sleep, the telephone rang in the sitting-room of his flat.

What he heard, tumbling up out of bed, struck the mist from his eyes and brain. It sent him downstairs after his car, to drive roaring out of Geneva by the rue de Lyons and the road to the French border. Only an hour later he discovered how much he cared for Audrey, lies and tricks and all. There was not even time to curse her. For terror gathered round at the Villa Rosalind, and the fangs of a murder-trap closed at last.

T
HE DOORBELL DID
not work, or did not seem to work.

“Hullo!” Brian called, and again rapped on the inside of the open door to the hall. “Isn’t there somebody at home?
Hullo!
”

There was no reply.

He glanced back at his car, a battered M.G., in the drive before the villa. The silence weighted him down. Though it was only a quarter to nine in the morning, this thundery overcast sky might have been any hour of the day except for the hush in and around these trees on the ridge.

Almost as soon as he had left the outskirts of Geneva, turning right for the main road towards Annecy and Chambéry, the hills began to climb into a steep limestone ridge with almost the effect of mountains. The French frontier, if he remembered correctly, was six or eight kilometres away.

“The Villa Rosalind, monsieur?” his informant had shouted from a bicycle. “But certainly I know the Villa Rosalind.”

“Is it far?”

“No, not far.”

“How do I find it?”

“It finds itself. A white house, all alone and not high, with a gable in front and a
creuser
at the back.”

He was fairly sure that
creuser
meant gully or ravine: an ugly image for this loneliness of trees, and the reality showed lonelier still.

Standing in front of the villa, which was unpretentious and undistinguished, of two storeys and perhaps fourteen rooms, he heard a prowling wind rise in the trees. The gable, or rather gable-outline, was unmistakable above the front door: the gable had a bull’s-eye window, of van-coloured glass, as one gaudy touch to overlook the door.

The wind rose and seethed. To the left of the villa was a lean-to garage for two cars, open and empty. The memory of last night, and particularly of the small hours when he last saw Audrey, returned with almost intolerable vividness now.

It had been past one in the morning when he drove her back to the Hotel Metropole. Audrey, hesitating at the entrance, had put out her hand.

“Good-night, Brian.”

“Good-night”

“You—you look depressed.”

“I am, a little.”

For abruptly, instead of shaking hands as he was doing, there had come over him an impulse to take her in his arms: an impulse so strong as to be terrifying. Perhaps Audrey’s intuition sensed this or perhaps not, but the look in her eyes changed.

“What’s wrong? You don’t still think that Mr. Ferrier and I …?”

“No, I don’t,” he almost snarled at her. “It was an idiotic notion.”

“If anybody ’phones me from the Villa Rosalind, Brian, I won’t speak. I shall just not answer the ’phone at all.”

“No; not that either. I want you to ring Phil. I promised him you would.”

“Ring Phil?” She froze in the dim-lighted doorway of the hotel. “Brian! You didn’t tell
him
you thought Mr. Ferrier and I …?”

“God damn it, what sort of swine do you take me for? No. Just say I had a bee in my bonnet, like all these cursed temperamental people; say you’re going to London, and you’ll write from there. But listen! Don’t talk to anybody else at that house. And, above all, don’t talk to Madam Eve. Agreed?”

“Brian, what
is
wrong?”

“Agreed?”

“Yes.” Her lips quivered. “Yes, yes, yes! Good-night.”

He had driven off with a grind and crunch of gears which expressed his mood. Afterwards, in the sitting-room of his small flat on the sixth floor of a new block overlooking the Rhône, he smoked cigarette after cigarette, staring out of the window.

A sleeping-pill was necessary. The noise of tumbling green water in the river, rising to open windows through a city as silent as Pompeii, plagued him with problems of murder or attempted murder before the drug took hold. Nor was it only a problem of murder. He should not have been thinking of Audrey: at least (let’s face it) in the way he did think of her.

Only an insistent screaming in his dreams, which became the ring of the telephone in broad daylight, banished bitter thoughts for worse ones. He stumbled into the other room; he had been listening to the frantic voice for twenty seconds before he realized what Audrey was telling him.

“Just a minute! Repeat that, will you?”

“Brian, for heaven’s sake don’t be cross! I’m only saying. …”

“
Where
did you say you are? You didn’t go out to that villa after all?”

“I didn’t mean to! I swear I didn’t mean to!”

“How long have you been there?”

“Since last night. Since about an hour after you left me.”

A clock on the low bookshelves, in a room of cream-stucco walls, indicated that it was just eight o’clock.

“You talked to your boy-friend? And he advised …?”

“No. I didn’t speak to Phil. They said it would be better if I—”

“Who said?”

“Brian, I’m sorry! I talked to Eve. And—and Mr. Ferrier called for me in a Rolls.”

When suspicions return, darker and sharper than they have been in the first place, they are all the worse because you believe you are being played for a fool.

“All right, young lady,” said Brian. There was a slightly sick feeling in his stomach. “You’ve made your choice. Now get out of it as well as you can.”

“Brian, are
you
going to desert me?”

About to replace the receiver, he saw the curtains blowing at the windows and tried to clear barbiturate-fumes from his head.

“Audrey, did you plan this last night?”

“No, no, no! Don’t be cross; oh, please don’t be cross! If you desert me …”

“Nobody’s deserting you. You’ve got a perfectly good boy-friend to depend on. Or you should have.”

“He’s gone to work. He works at Dufresne’s Bank in Geneva. And there’s nobody else here.”

“Nobody else? At eight o’clock in the morning?”

“I mean there’s nobody I can trust. You’ve got to come out and take me away from here. I did something foolish. I—I didn’t think there was any danger, not really. But she’s out of her mind. She really is out of her mind. Please, please don’t leave me with her!”

Thunder-clouds were massing up to the east, throwing their shadows. Brian stared at the telephone.

“Brian! Please! Are you still there?”

“Hang on,” he said. “I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

And so, at a quarter to nine, on that lonely ridge where the white-painted house loomed with a bull’s-eye window of multicoloured glass, he took a few steps back to study its façade. But this told nothing. There were flowers in window-boxes. There was a strip of brick terrace in front of the open door. Otherwise …

“Hullo, there!”

Brian entered the hall.

A certain casual untidiness, despite the breath of polished floors and fresh curtains, lay all about him. A room to the left, a room to the right, opened under broad arches from the central hall with a staircase on the left-hand wall. As though for a deliberate touch of naïveté in the decoration, there was a brightly coloured wall-clock whose pendulum had the figure of a doll-girl in a swing.