In Spite of Thunder (8 page)

Brian answered her without raising his voice.

“This about it,” he retorted. “Admittedly you were waiting for Philip Ferrier to take you out to dinner. But any woman who’s expecting to be called for, even by her best boy-friend, waits in the foyer until he goes in to collect her. Or else she stays in her room until the reception-desk ’phones to tell her he’s downstairs. She doesn’t do what you did and she doesn’t say what you said.”

“I was only—”

“Shut up.” And he rapped his knuckles on the table. “The implication was that you had mistaken me for Philip, wasn’t it?”

“Of course! That’s what happened.”

“Oh, no. It couldn’t have happened. I’m just over six feet tall, and nobody could possibly call me a heavyweight. Philip is more than half a head shorter, and he’s on the chunky side. All you could see was the outline of a tall, rangy bloke in a Homburg hat, paying off a taxi in a semi-dark street. But it was enough to upset you badly.”

And then, as he studied a face growing ghostlike in the dwindling lights, all Brian’s anger began to change to a deep and desperate concern.

“Didn’t you mistake me for somebody else? Didn’t you mistake me for Desmond Ferrier, turning up at the hotel a good many hours before you expected him? And, if that’s so, can you honestly claim to have any great affection for his son?”

E
VERY LIGHT IN
the room went out.

The thud of a tom-tom was joined by others, hammering in barbaric rhythm and swelling to a thunder that drowned out his voice. In total darkness he could not even see the white of Audrey’s dress.

The beams of two spotlights, springing up at either side of the waxed floor, converged on the closed curtains of the stage. Of Audrey’s expression, as the diffused glow touched her dark brown hair and set a mask on her face, he could read nothing.

It was perhaps ten seconds later, while tom-toms banged at the nerves, that Audrey began to slap at the table like a woman in a frenzy or a child in a tantrum.

“Oh, God save the lot of us and you most of all! You think I’m having an affair with Mr. Ferrier. Is that it?”

“It doesn’t matter if you are.”

“It does matter! It matters a great deal! Is that what you’ve been thinking?”

“Yes.”

“And you were carrying a suitcase, so you imagined that meant …?”

“We can’t get anywhere if you slide away from every question.
Did
you expect Desmond Ferrier at the hotel? Was he supposed to be there at some time later tonight?”

“Yes, I did. Yes, he was. But it wasn’t for that reason. If you ever breathe a word to Phil about this, or about my agreeing to meet him at all …!”

“I’m not going to tell anybody. But I’m too fond of you to see you involved in a situation that’s going straight towards another murder with you in the middle of it.”

“Brian, get me out of here. I won’t go back to the hotel, if you’re afraid they’ll ring me up and lure me away; I swear I won’t. Now please, please get me out of here!”

Brian stood up, taking out a note-case. Instantly a waiter appeared at his side and said something he could not catch under the thunder of drums.

The curtains swept apart. Half a dozen remarkably undressed young ladies, three to each side of the stage, coiled down a couple of steps and moved out close past the spectators for what the bills described as a pantomime of the jungle.

“Audrey! Wait!”

But Audrey, who now seemed to hate
La Boule Noire
as much as she had previously liked it, stopped only when Brian caught her arm. That was the moment when they both saw Desmond Ferrier.

He did not see them, or did not seem to. He had just pushed through the crowd to a table on the opposite edge of the floor, and he was striking a match to light a cigarette.

Evidently he had left his hat at the
vestiaire
on the way upstairs, as Brian had left a black hat of the same kind. The glow of the match-flame illumined his face: a strong face, with heavy-lidded eyes and hollows under the cheek-bones.

The nose was thin and aquiline, the mouth an elaborately mocking curve. Except for lines of bitterness or discontent stamped into the forehead or round the mouth, which Brian had observed at the Hotel du Rhône, that face showed as comparatively few signs of age as the ruffled dark hair a little shot with grey.

Clear in the match-flame, briefly kindled, Desmond Ferrier’s eyes turned sideways towards a shapely brunette at the head of the dancers.

The tom-toms hammered, the smoky lights shifting colour from white to yellow and then to red. The match was blown out.

“Brian! What’s delaying you?”

“Don’t you see?”

“Yes, of course. Does it matter?”

“I think it might. The last time I saw him, he was driving home with the rest of the party. A few questions might be in order.”

“Brian, no! You wouldn’t dare!”

“Now why the devil wouldn’t I dare? What special and particular privileges has
he
got?”

Angry voices were crying at them to sit down or get out of the way. Brian looked down at Audrey’s eyes; he realized that he had no idea how much truth she was telling him, or how far he could trust her. When Audrey turned and bolted, through a group which made way for her, he followed her less because of indecision than because of a gesture made by Desmond Ferrier.

Ferrier, much more primed with whisky than he had been an hour or so before, was signalling across the floor. And he was signalling to Dr. Gideon Fell.

Meanwhile, as for Audrey …

To leave that room was a weight off the lungs and brain. Brian picked up his hat at the
vestiaire
. As he ran downstairs, as the noise receded, he found his wits steadying too. At the foot of the stairs a long and narrow room, set out with chromium chairs and black-topped chromium tables for a lower-floor bar, stretched in brooding half-light to the door giving on the street.

Audrey, flushed but steady of gaze, waited for him by one table with her wrap trailing from her shoulder. There was nobody else in sight.

“All right,” said Brian. Automatically he began to shout; then lowered his voice. “Where do you want to go? My car’s outside, round the corner from the Place Neuve.”

“Your car?”

“Do you still keep forgetting I live here? In a flat not two hundred yards from the Hotel du Rhône? Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t want to go anywhere. But I had to get out of that awful stuffiness before I fainted. Can’t we—can’t we sit down here? Won’t this do?”

Again he conquered an impulse to shout.

“Anywhere will do, Audrey, provided you stop telling a pack of lies and explain why your great friend Desmond Ferrier was going to visit you at the Metropole tonight. Is he still expected there, by the way?”

“Mr. Ferrier is not my great friend. And I haven’t been telling you any real lies at all,” cried Audrey, “even if I didn’t give away everything because I promised I wouldn’t.” A singular luminous fixity glazed over her eyes. “Brian, I do believe …”

“You believe what?”

She darted back past him. He thought she was going under the archway and back up the stairs; instead she sat down in a corner under a half-partition shielding the archway at one side, with a black-topped table in front of her and a sign advertising Cinzano above her head.

“You believe what?” Brian repeated. “And what, exactly, is your notion of telling the truth?”

“Mr. Ferrier wanted to talk to me about Eve! That’s all there was to it.”

“All?”

“All that’s important. I told you at the hotel: my father keeps me under such ridiculous surveillance that sometimes I could scream. So I wanted to have twenty-four hours here on my own. Just to be free, if you can understand that! Or can you?”

“Never mind. What happened?”

“I wasn’t even sure I wanted to see Phil. I did tell Phil in one letter I might be here a day early. I didn’t say I
would
, I just said I might, and where I was going to stay if I did. And then, when my plane got to the airport in the middle of the afternoon, Mr. Ferrier was there waiting for me.”

“Desmond Ferrier?”

“Yes.” Audrey spoke every word with intense care. “I hadn’t told him I should be there; neither had Phil. But there he was. He said he had something terribly important to discuss with me about Eve. He said he would be occupied, unfortunately, until late in the evening; but people didn’t keep early hours here as they did in London. Couldn’t he, couldn’t he pretty please, drop in and take me out for a drink about midnight?”

“Midnight?”

“Brian, this is the truth!”

“I’m not denying it, am I?”

“Well!” Audrey spread out her hands. “He’s terribly distinguished-looking, and he’s got a way with him, and he rather sweeps you off your feet. I didn’t know what to say, so I said yes.”

“One day, my girl, that may be your epitaph.”

“For heaven’s sake, Brian, will you
ever
take me seriously? There was no harm in it, was there? Anyway, I had hardly been at the hotel for half an hour when Phil rang up to see if I was there, and asked me out to dinner. I couldn’t refuse Phil, could I?”

“No, you could not,” Brian told her with some restraint. “But you mentioned to him, of course, you were seeing his father later?”

“I didn’t, and you know I didn’t. There wasn’t anything wrong. Mr. Ferrier didn’t do anything he shouldn’t. That is … well, he didn’t. But what if Phil got the wrong impression? So I asked Phil, on the ’phone, if he’d take me to a night-club or something after dinner. If he kept me out late, than I could change my mind and I needn’t see Mr. Ferrier at all.”

Brian drew out a chair and sat down opposite her at the table. The noise from upstairs, only a little diminished, sounded as though the house itself were stamping its feet.

“Now what did Mr. Desmond Ferrier do or say, Audrey, that might be misinterpreted?”

“Do you care? Do you really care?”

On the table there was an ashtray also advertising Cinzano. He resisted the impulse to pick it up and smash it on the floor.

“You’re like Mr. Desmond Ferrier,” said Audrey, “in more ways than one. Only you don’t know it. You’ll never learn it. Naturally I was frightened when I thought I saw him get out of the taxi!”

“But it wasn’t the actor-hero; it was I. Weren’t you disappointed as well as relieved?”

Audrey drew in her breath with a gasp.

“Disappointed? Desmond Ferrier positively infuriates you, doesn’t he?”

“I never said—”

“
I
say it, though. And yet you don’t mind Phil. You like Phil. Shall I tell you why?”

Brian seized the ashtray, but put it down again.

“Phil’s a darling,” Audrey continued passionately. “He’s terribly good-looking; he’s really well-meaning and good-natured; and yet, according to your standards, he’s a bit of a fool. You don’t mind that. But Mr. Ferrier is clever; and clever men irritate you because you’re clever yourself.—Don’t you
dare
hit me!”

“I wasn’t going to hit you. We weren’t discussing the shortcomings of my character.”

“No; it seems we were discussing the shortcomings of mine. All right! You turned up at the Metropole Hotel, and told me about Eve being accused of murder at Berchtesgaden. Then I heard about Mr. Ferrier’s ‘joke,’ if it is a joke, about Eve wanting to poison him. At dinner …”

“Go on!”

“At dinner,” and there were tears in Audrey’s eyes, “Phil told me about an unexpected guest who’d got to their house at noon today. Phil didn’t know much about him. But
I’d
heard of him. His name’s Dr. Fell.”

“Then maybe we’re reaching a point of good sense at last. You saw Dr. Fell, didn’t you?”

“Saw him? How in heaven’s name could I see him?”

“Well, he’s upstairs now. He was at the table next to ours. I rather think he’s been watching you.”

There was a pause.

“You don’t mean a terribly and incredibly large man with a mop of hair over one eye? Who looks so absent-minded he doesn’t even seem to know where he is? That’s not Dr. Fell?”

“That’s the man.”

“But—!”

“He really is absent-minded, Audrey. You may have heard of the telegram to his wife: ‘Am at Market Harborough; where ought I to be?’ Unlike Gerald Hathaway, who never does anything by accident, Gideon Fell seldom does anything by design. On the other hand, finding him in a night-club is a little too unbelievable unless someone begged him to look you over.”

It was as though the sheer unfairness of all created things took Audrey by the throat.

“But why? I—I haven’t got anything to
do
with this awful business, whatever it is!”

“No; you haven’t. And nobody is going to say you have. That’s why you’re flying back to London tomorrow.” Brian stopped, glancing to the right. “Listen!”

Audrey began to speak, but thought better of it.

Roaring waves of applause front upstairs, rising and then dying away to silence, suggested that the jungle number had ended. This rather sinister ground-floor bar, with its framed photographs round the walk, was equally silent.

From beyond the archway, in the direction of the stairs leading up, issued sounds as though a well-grown elephant were trying to descend with the aid of a crutch-handled stick. Next they heard the unmistakable voice of Desmond Ferrier, notable for its jocularity and power as well as its clarity of diction.

“It wouldn’t be chivalrous, Doctor, to say my dear wife has a slate loose. No!”

“Harrumph? Hah?”

“However, I tell you straight we’re getting towards very dangerous ground.” The voice broke off. “Damn it, man, can’t you look where you’re going? You haven’t got the figure for negotiating stairs at night-clubs.”

“Sir,” intoned the wheezy voice of Dr. Fell, “I have not even got the figure for night-clubs. Especially since I don’t know why I am here.”

“You’re obliging an old friend.”

“In what particular way? If your son and Miss Page are engaged to be married—”

Desmond Ferrier spoke with mocking emphasis, like Mephistopheles.

“Ah, but we don’t
know
they’re engaged. A fairly close study of Miss Page’s letters to my son, gained without his knowledge, leads me to believe they soon will be. Anyway, I hope they are.”