In Spite of Thunder (23 page)

“’Morning, old boy. And you needn’t look so surprised.” Ferrier showed his teeth. “You’re in the telephone-book, you know.”

“I’m also in the flat. If you want to see me, you’ve only got to ring the bell. If you want to see anyone else …”

“I want to see you. Mind if I come in?”

“The breakfast, Madame Duvallon.”

Brian waited until Madame Duvallon, whipping off her coat and hat, had gone into the little kitchen. Then he motioned Ferrier inside, and closed the door. Ferrier, at a not very convincing swagger, strode into the living-room.

“Yes?” Brian prompted. “Have you any particular reason for being here?”

“For one thing,” returned Ferrier, taking his hands out of his pockets, “I’ve been kicked out of my own house. Or practically kicked out. And to think I was the one who asked Dr. Fell to clear up this business!”

Brian waited.

“
I
asked him,” repeated Ferrier, with a bitterness which seemed almost past bearing. “I told everyone all about him. I spread the good word. I thought his presence would be a warning. I—” Ferrier stopped. “Now he’s working hand in glove with the police. Aubertin seems to have a high opinion of him, which is more than I’m beginning to have. He even defers to that little swine Hathaway; he’s been doing it since Thursday night.”

“Hathaway’s all right; he’s just a little above himself, that’s all.

“Ah, yes. I forgot Hathaway’s a friend of yours too.”

Abruptly, bristling, they faced each other fully.

“Now what if he is?” Brian demanded. “Did you come here just to tell me all this?”

“No.”

“Well, then?”

“I wanted to see you,” Ferrier replied, after a pause and a faintly deprecating gesture, “because Paula asked me to.”

Whereupon he dropped his guard.

“Innes, I’m serious about Paula. I’m as serious about her as you are about Audrey.”

“Serious?”

“Why can’t I say it straight out? Why do all of us (you too!) pretend we think honest feelings are infra dig? In the nineteen-twenties, when I was still young, a lot of people in the theatre began jeering that all the old plays were funny. If you took a part with real guts in it, if you cut loose and gave it the works, they said you were funny too. They tried to scare you with the word ‘ham.’ And why? Because they couldn’t do a part with guts in it, so they knew they’d better not try.

“The theatre’s changed now, thank God. Or at least it’s changing. Even then I thought, ‘To hell with this mealy-mouthed stuff. Play it in the grand manner or don’t play it at all. If a line’s difficult, show you know your job by getting away with it.’ I mean—”

Ferrier stopped.

“Look here, Innes. Do you understand what I’m talking about, or don’t you?”

“Yes. I understand.”

Every time you tried to be hostile towards this man, Brian was thinking, he disarmed you with an honesty and even a naïveté that had its own appeal.

“This is real life, old boy; it’s not the stage. What I’m trying to say …”

“What you’re trying to say,” Brian interrupted, “is that you really were with Paula for three hours on Thursday night. Paula doesn’t cheat. She’s never cheated or tried to take you away from Eve. But you think it would sound uproariously funny if you said so.”

“Yes!”

“Why should it sound funny?”

“Well, it does. I’m really in love with that damn woman, though I’m a good deal older than she is. You can’t understand that, Innes. …”

“I can’t, eh?”

“But that’s not the point. You guessed I was with her. Did you tell the police about it?”

“No. I promised her I wouldn’t, and I’ve kept the promise.”

“Then what did you tell Hathaway?”

“
Hathaway?
Not a thing. Hathaway doesn’t have any concern in this.”

“He oughtn’t to have, maybe, but he’s pulling strings. Last night, when we left you and Audrey at the Cave of the Witches, we drove straight home. Hathaway got back half an hour afterwards, with ‘inspiration’ written all over him. He began questioning Paula. She won’t even say what she told him, but I don’t like it.”

“If you’re worried about yourself …”

“For the sweet love of the sweet so-and-so,” yelled Ferrier, with another of those elaborate Biblical oaths which were as much a part of his mind as of his speech, “do you think I’m worried about myself? Or ever have been? It’s Paula.”

That was when the telephone rang again.

The effect on their nerves was not helped by the noise of a tea-kettle, which had begun to scream in the kitchen before Madame Duvallon twitched it off the gas-burner. Nor was it helped by the voice Brian heard when he answered the ’phone.

“Forgive me for troubling you,” begged that familiar voice. “But is Desmond there? He said he was going to see you. May I—?”

The sound of the voice, if not the actual words, reached Ferrier.

“That’s Paula, isn’t it?”

“Yes. She wants to talk to you.”

Handing the ’phone to Ferrier, Brian went over and looked out of one window so as pointedly to avoid listening. Under soft sunshine Geneva wore its usual pastel colours of grey and brown and white. By craning out of the window and sideways, he could see the lake stretching deep grey-blue with the white of an occasional sail.

“But that was seventeen years ago,” he heard Ferrier objecting. “It can’t make any difference what you failed to tell him then! I don’t see it makes any difference now.”

The faint drone of the voice went on. Less than thirty seconds later Brian gave up all pretence of disinterest.

“
Cornered? What do you mean, he’s got you cornered?
”

Ferrier, with a face of incredulity and collapse, listened to six more words.

“Oh, I shall be there,” he said. “That’s my house; they can’t keep me out of it. I shall be there.”

The ’phone went down with a bang.

“What is it?” Brian demanded. “What’s the trouble?”

“Excuse me, old boy. I must take off in a hurry.”

You would not have believed that a man who called himself elderly could have moved so fast. Big shoes thudded across the living-room and the entry. The front door opened and slammed.

Brian, with a sense of approaching catastrophe, had to adjust his wits so as to remember French speech when he also hurried out into the hall.

“Madame Duvallon!” he called. “You had better wake up Miss Page as quickly as possible. There may not even be time for breakfast. You had better—”

He stopped. The bedroom door was wide open. Madame Duvallon, carrying a tray with a tea-service and an enormous cup and saucer, emerged from the doorway. China skittered on the tray as it slid in her hands.

“M. Innes, I cannot wake her up. The young lady is not here.”

Neither of them spoke for the next few seconds. A clamour of thickening morning traffic rose from the quais.

“M. Innes,” cried Madame Duvallon, seeing his face, “the young lady has gone out. I cannot help it if she has gone out. Look for yourself!”

Brian looked.

Audrey’s nightgown, a flimsy and transparent affair, had been thrown down across the foot of a tumbled bed. Her small suitcase, brought up last night from his car, again lay open on a chair. Across the mirror of the dressing-table, still unerased, mocking him, ran those words she had written in lipstick when she left the flat earlier last night instead of (presumably) early this morning.

‘I love you too.’ ran the words. ‘Please forgive what I’m going to do.’

Whether they applied to this morning as well as last night, or whether Audrey had simply forgotten to erase them, he couldn’t tell. But she was gone.

The ringing of the telephone, dinning in his ears immediately afterwards, should have brought an eagerness of hope. Instead, human nature being what it is, most comprehensively he cursed that noise because its suddenness made him jump. Madame Duvallon, a practical woman, set the perspective right.

“M. Innes,” she proclaimed with cold dignity, “this is not good sense. The telephone: it sounds. Please to answer it.”

Brian did so. The voice of Dr. Fell, hoarse and very disturbed, for the first few words was incomprehensible. Afterwards it sharpened.

“I greatly fear—” said Dr. Fell.

“Yes?”

“Matters have got out of hand. Archons of Athens! I didn’t anticipate the man would carry anything so far, or lead us to so lunatic a pass. Is Mr. Desmond Ferrier still with you?”

“No; you must have guessed he isn’t. Ferrier left a minute or two ago. And where’s Audrey? Have you any idea what’s happened to Audrey?”

“Oh, ah. I—er—have just discovered that. It would be neither quite fair nor quite accurate to say Miss Page is under arrest. …”

“
Arrest?
”

“Pray accept my word,” roared Dr. Fell, “that you have little cause for worry. I beg you to follow Mr. Ferrier; to overtake him and stop him if you can. If not, come on to the villa by yourself. Do not argue with me; stop him!”

“Now just a minute!”

Once more the line went dead. Madame Duvallon, putting down the tea-tray, first called on her Maker and then burst into tears.

T
HE VILLA ROSALIND
, an unrelieved white except for its bright flower-boxes and its bull’s-eye window of coloured glass, loomed up as even less pleasant a place under pale sunshine than under a dusk of approaching storm.

Its windows, shutters all closed, had a blank and empty stare. It looked deserted, despite the crowding of cars in the drive. Even its repose, like that of the woods stretching round about and the deep gully behind, gave it the appearance of a house poisoned by haunting. And perhaps from much the same cause.

Emotion rises too high. It ends in murder. With life gone and the body in decay, other forces enter and gather and whisper suggestions to the brain.

Brian couldn’t help the fancy. It was true, when he barely slowed the speed of the car and plunged in towards the villa, that his heart rose up in his throat from another cause. He braked just in time to avoid smashing into the rear bumper of the Rolls.

You can’t overtake a Rolls in an ancient M.G., even though traffic impedes you both and though you drive like a maniac when it doesn’t.

The other car had been left there, empty amid the other empty cars. Desmond Ferrier, presumably, had gone into the villa.

And yet …

Even in his preoccupation about Audrey, Brian could not quite shake off that feeling of a house given over to a dead woman.

“Hullo!” he called at the front door, just as he had done the previous morning. Automatically he reached out for the bell that wouldn’t work.

There was no reply.

He opened the door and walked into the lower hall.

It was nearly dark; the wooden shutters on the downstairs rooms, at both sides as well as in front, had also been closed. Only the clock, with its pendulum of a doll in a swing, stirred and ticked with endless beats. Then someone moved near the foot of the staircase.

Gustave Aubertin, Director of Police, stood with his sharp, thin face vaguely illumined by a spear of light through the crescent-pattern design in a shutter.

“Good morning, Mr. Innes. Please go upstairs. You will find some of your friends there.”

The English words, though precisely spoken, were not quite as unemotional as the clock. Brian strode towards him.

“Where’s Audrey Page?”

“Go upstairs, Mr. Innes.”

“Where’s Audrey Page?”

“She is here. But you will not see her just yet. For her own good she is being detained.”

“Does that mean arrested?”

“Arrested? Nonsense!” M. Aubertin, grey of hair and even of face, made an impatient lip-movement in the beam of light. “She was detained at the airport earlier this morning.”

Another realization, which should have struck Brian long before then, made him shift and rearrange memories.

“The airport. The airport! I hope you don’t imagine she was trying to leave the country? Yesterday,” Brian tried to speak slowly, “she sent all her luggage to the airport except a small suitcase she’s got at my flat. If she rushed out and went to the airport this morning, she only wanted to get her luggage back. That’s
all
.”

“So she said.”

“But you don’t believe her?”

“Go upstairs, Mr. Innes! Have you found us so very difficult or lacking in understanding? Nevertheless, before you go—”

M. Aubertin hesitated, his sharp eyes fixed.

“There must be no more concealment by anyone,” he said. “You and my friend Dr. Fell coached Miss Page in a series of lies she was to tell. No more of that, I say! Miss Page has been persuaded to confess the truth about what she saw and heard in the study yesterday morning.”

“I see. Dr. Fell’s being detained too? And I’m another culprit?”

“Oh, no.” Sour and yet suave, angry and yet fair, the Director of Police swept out his hand. “Dr. Fell was quite right to take the course he did. So were you, though from less far-seeing motives. If we had heard Miss Page’s true story at the beginning, we should have been badly misled. Miss Paula Catford has also been persuaded to confess.”

“To what?”

“To every conversation with you, with Miss Page, with Mr. Desmond Ferrier, with everyone else. We have
all
the evidence. Sir Gerald Hathaway has heard it too.”

“But—!”

“All is fair, I think, in setting a trap or weaving a rope. Go upstairs, Mr. Innes! I have other duties here.”

“But Desmond Ferrier, I was going to say: he got here ahead of me?”

“He also is being detained, perhaps for another reason. You will not see him either. How many times,” M. Aubertin cried out, “must I request you to go upstairs?”

Yes; the trap was beginning to close.

In the upstairs hall, as dark as it had been yesterday morning, the only light which penetrated was that from the open doors of the two bathrooms: each at one end of the cross-passage across the villa.

Three doors faced Brian as he reached the top of the stairs. Two of these doors, the bedroom on either side of the study, remained closed. A policeman, motionless, stood in front of each. The study door alone was unguarded, partly open, as though it invited.