Charm remained to her, or would remain when she recovered her poise; and a still-handsome if somewhat overblown body; and a personality better than pretty looks. Something else, Brian was thinking, something indefinable, something beyond beauty-parlours, had blurred the image and muddled its edges. The tragedy might be in Eve Ferrier’s mind if she were not emotionally mature enough to accept facts.
Only a flash; it was gone. She laughed, nearly herself again, and moved forward in an almost-convincing lightness.
“Paula, my dear! It’s good to see you, and it’s extremely kind of you when I was so foolish as to write that letter.”
“It’s not foolish at all.” Paula hurried up the two little marble steps. “Who wants people screaming a lot of ridiculous nonsense and making it unpleasant for everybody?”
“For me, certainly. Yes; there I must agree. I can’t help it. It may be foolish,” the fine voice rang out, “but there it is. How good to see you, or did I say that? And isn’t that Mr. Hathaway? I do so beg your pardon! I mean Sir Gerald now, don’t I?”
Hathaway looked up.
“What you like, madam,” he said.
He was still pale. Eve, making an entrance of the two steps, poised there an instant more.
“I can rely on you, I hope?” she suddenly asked Paula.
“Of course! You know it!”
“Yes. To be sure. Dear Sir Gerald.” Glitter and brightness surrounded the too-yellow hair; then sincerity coloured her voice as she extended her hand. “It was a most unhappy occasion when we met last. I loathed troubling you. And let’s not talk about those old days, shall we? But I do hope you’re not going to say I poisoned anyone, are you?”
Again Hathaway looked up.
“Madam, why should I say that?”
(“Steady!” thought Brian.)
“Well, everyone else does.” Eve laughed. It was as though a wheel went round behind her eyes. “I—I came here tonight to find Desmond. It’s absurd, isn’t it, to be so fond of my own husband after all these years? It seems so horribly uncivilized. But there it is. Can you understand that, Paula?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“That’s what I mean. And I do intend to be serious, Sir Gerald,” declared Eve, “as you will see very shortly. It’s only that I don’t want to interrupt any sort of conference, and I don’t seem to have met that gentleman there.”
As she looked at Brian, her gaze slid over the sofa where the album had lain open. He saw with a shock that it was closed now; Paula must have closed it, though he could not remember seeing her do so. And Brian introduced himself.
“I’m a friend of Audrey Page’s father, Mrs. Ferrier.”
“Audrey? Ah, yes. I’d heard she was here. That doesn’t surprise me. But the rest of you …” Eve had a really magnetic smile. Everything else was subtly wrong: the colours of her clothes and make-up, the series of wrong contrasts, in a woman once noted for good taste. “Now I’ll be serious. I won’t ask you what you’re doing at this hotel. But I will ask you: are you ignoring me? Is everybody ignoring me? Have you decided you won’t come to the Villa Rosalind after all?”
“Are you speaking to me, madam?” asked Hathaway.
“If you please, yes.”
“The question, Mrs. Ferrier, is whether you still want us there. Miss Catford is trying to help you. I am not.”
“And why should you help me? I can’t expect it. But we want something from each other, don’t we?”
“If you put it like that …!” And Hathaway lifted his shoulders.
“I do. You want to play detective. I want these old rumours killed and killed forever. Killed!” said Eve, seeming to stare at the past. “I have had much trouble, you know. A new life can open for me, even a return to the stage and a triumphant one, once I’ve finished the book I’m writing now. It’s inexpressibly sweet to think of that. But I can’t do it if they still say I’m a murderess and half mad as well. Are the three of you staying at the Hotel du Rhône?”
“Miss Catford and I are staying here, yes.”
“Is there any reason why you should? Can’t you occupy the rooms ready and waiting for you at my villa? Now? This very night? That is, unless you’re afraid?”
“Hardly afraid, dear Mrs. Ferrier.”
Eve nodded. Lithely, with the flash of an ugly look, she sat down in the leather sofa beside the brief-case and the album.
“This is yours, I imagine.” She picked up the brief-case, stamped with the letters G. H. “And this too.” She picked up the album and riffled through its pages. “For God’s sweet sake, my dear man,” she added in a startlingly different tone, “do you really think I drugged or poisoned Hector Matthews?”
The words, though not loudly spoken, had a rasp which startled Eve herself. She sat up straight.
“Sir Gerald, I beg your pardon. That was unforgivably crude of me. I am desperate, you see; this means my happiness. Do you think that?”
“Yes. I do. But what makes you say I do?”
“That’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“Not at all obvious. No, no, no! Most people think you deliberately pushed him when he turned dizzy. Since you ask me the direct question, I give you the direct answer.”
Eve closed her eyes.
“You must have known that, Mrs. Ferrier. Your letters indicated you did. Where did you get this notion of drugging or poisoning? It only occurred to me after you wrote to me a month ago.”
“Only then?”
“Only then. When and where did you get the notion?”
“Seventeen years ago,” Eve answered clearly. She put down the album, and rose to her feet. “From the German surgeon who did a post-mortem examination of poor Hector’s body.”
Paula Catford turned away, but turned back again.
“I never dreamed at the time,” said Eve, “those Nazi officials could be suspicious of me. Never! But they were suspicious of everyone; they were guarding their precious Führer; they had the security-police there. When they told me privately there would be a post-mortem, and in my naïve way I asked why, Dr. Richter laughed and said it was only a formality. ‘We must look for poisons, you know.’”
Whereupon, in a flash-brief but vivid piece of mimicry, they saw the doctor’s face and heard his voice as Eve imitated it.
“Seventeen years! I never even remembered it until people began whispering. Did I throw poor Hector over the parapet? Or was it something else? God! Why are they all so vicious? Why won’t they let you be happy?”
“Eve,” cried Paula, “you have got to stop this. You’ll kill yourself with worry. You can’t go on.”
“I greatly fear, Mrs. Ferrier,” snapped Hathaway, “you will have to go on. You are not saying there was a post-mortem?”
“Oh, but I am saying just that!”
“Hardly a post-mortem by a reputable surgeon?”
“Oh, but it was by a very reputable surgeon. Dr. Walter Richter. He’s a friend of yours, I think? Or he says so?”
“He is a friend of mine, and a sound man. How do you know all this?”
“I wrote to him. There was no drug or poison in poor Hector’s body.”
Outside, in the hot night beyond the goldfish-bowl windows, a breeze stirred for the first time. A faint rumble of thunder came prowling in from the direction of the lake. Brian, the only one who glanced up, saw the glitter of the opening glass door; that, for the moment, was all he observed beyond their group.
“Madam,” Hathaway was crying, “that’s impossible!”
“I have here,” said Eve, opening her handbag, “a letter from Dr. Richter. Here is his address at Koenigstrasse 15, Stuttgart; also his telephone-number.”
“And what of that?”
“Please read what Dr. Richter says. It’s written in English. If you still think this is a game of some kind, I want you to telephone him at my expense.”
In taking a letter out of the handbag, Eve discovered something else which seemed to startle her. It was, apparently, a two-ou
nce perfume-bottle of clouded glass and glass-stoppered, across which curled a gilt label with the raised red name of Spectre de la Rose. Eve turned it over in a rather shaky hand.
“Come, now!” she added. “I never carry this in a handbag. Why should anybody? I really must be losing my mind. Anyway, though!—”
And she gestured.
Behind her back, up the two marble steps, appeared a tall man who had entered by the front doors a moment before. In a black soft hat and a careless dark lounge-suit, his figure stood out rakishly against light-coloured walls. He was well into middle age. But you would have noticed him anywhere by an air, a presence, an unpredictable aliveness like the steel and coil of a taut spring.
“Anyway, though,” Eve continued, “that post-mortem examination was done so soon after death that even a drug to make him unsteady would have left traces. And there wasn’t anything at all. Will you read this, Sir Gerald?”
“As you like, madam.”
She extended the letter in the same hand that held the perfume-bottle, and Hathaway took it.
“I want to be friends with everybody,” said Eve. “I do! I want you to come out to our house tonight, this very night, and talk it all over. There isn’t any poison! There never was!”
Behind her back, up the two steps, the tall man stopped.
Again Brian glanced up. So did Paula, who was standing so close to Brian that her shoulder brushed the upper part of his left arm.
Brian saw the hat, the shoulders, the bearing of the man in front of him; and an explanation of one part of the problem suddenly fell into place. But he had no time to consider this, or to think of its implications.
“Madam, this letter—!”
“You must believe it! I’ve often played a murderess. It’s rather amusing and exciting. This isn’t. Paula and I aren’t liars. We can’t make a man die by accident. That’s what happened to poor Hector. Let’s all be friends, can’t we?”
And then, behind her back, Desmond Ferrier spoke.
“‘How now, ye secret, black, and midnight hags?’”
Eve did not scream.
But her face turned a muddy colour under the make-up. The little perfume bottle flew out of her extended hand and smashed in three pieces on the marble floor at Hathaway’s feet. Hathaway jumped back with a bouncing curse. The contents of the bottle, with a sizzling noise and an acrid odour, burnt in spattered little puffs growing black against the floor. Catching up Paula under knees and arms, Brian swung her off her feet just before the living burns touched her shoe.
“Throw some magazines down there,” he said, “before anybody else sees. That’s oil of vitriol. Or you can call it sulphuric acid.”
V
AUDREY PAGE’S WHITE gown, no less than her arms and shoulders, could be seen even in smoke-blurred gloom. She was at a table just beyond the spotlight. Tango-music, though it had a beat of South American drums, to Brian always suggested Paris because he associated Paris with that particular tune.
Brian was still swearing.
He shouldn’t have been so enraged with Audrey for what she had said that night. Unless he did happen to be in love with a girl nearly twenty years younger than himself, he had no right to be enraged.
But the impulse to wring her neck …
This night-club called La Boule Noire, which is not far from the Ba-Ta-Clan and very much like it, can be found one floor up in one of those steep, narrow streets rising through the Old Town towards the Cathedral.
Clocks rang the quarter-hour to midnight, startling him with the realization that oil of vitriol had splashed a danger-warning only an hour ago, as Brian went upstairs at La Boule Noire. Afterwards he could have heard no clock in Geneva.
Music smote out at him above the blur of voices. Spectators’ faces, spirit-photographs built up in a pyramid above the long bar-counter, looked out and down towards the stage across a waxed floor-space between.
“Monsieur, there is no room! The second sitting will begin—”
Brian produced a Swiss fifty-franc note. There was room.
On the waxed floor, beneath and in front of a gaudy stage, the spotlight followed two dancers amid roars of mirth. Heat and a dampness of alcohol flowed over a mob through which waiters with trays wormed like rabbits into burrows.
“If you please! If you please!”
Only a hundred-franc note halted one of these waiters with the if-you-please shouts.
“You see that dark-haired young man there? With the young lady in the white dress? Sitting at the table midway across on the edge of the dance-floor?”
“There?”
“Just there. Tell him he is summoned to the telephone. Tell him it’s here, by the bar. Tell him it’s very important. Tell him it’s from his home.”
The waiter shouted assent and dived again.
On the floor, wearing only her body-powder and a G-string, a tall and supple blonde was engaged in a mock Apache-dance with an undersized man wearing sinister underworld clothes from cap and muffler to chequered suit. Only, instead of the Apache hurling his girl all over the floor as the drums whacked on the down-beat, she was hurling him.
Again the Apache struck wood with a crash that jarred champagne-coolers and sifted up dust. The crowd whooped. The girl, icy-faced, caught him as he danced back. Next time he landed almost on the table of a stout, elderly couple in evening-clothes.
Philip Ferrier, white dinner-jacket somewhat rumpled, pushed through the crowd.
“There isn’t any ’phone-call,” said Brian, seizing his arm. “I’ve got to talk to you alone.”
“Listen! Audrey’s there by herself!”
“Suppose she is? This is quite a fashionable haunt.”
“Maybe it is,” retorted Philip, straightening his tie, “but it’s no place to take your girl unless she insists. If somebody thinks she’s one of the entertainers and asks her to go home with him—”
“Let’s not worry about that, shall we?”
“Look, what’s up? What’s the situation?”
“The situation,” said Brian, “is just about as bad as it can be.”
“Why?”
“Murder.”
He had to yell this word. The Apache went face down and managed to upset half a dozen glasses. Heat, doubt, uncertainty all wove like the beat of music.
“No, nobody has been killed just yet,” said Brian. “But it’s being arranged and I don’t know for whom. Paula Catford and Gerald Hathaway have both been persuaded, or challenged, to leave their hotel and go out to the Villa Rosalind tonight. I want you to do me a great favour. I want you to make the excuse that you’ve been called away. I want you to leave here now, and let me take Audrey back to her hotel.”
“That’s asking a hell of a lot, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is. All the same, if you think as much of that damned fool girl as I believe you do, you’ll agree to it.”
“Look, I couldn’t leave her here even if I wanted to! If this is important, I can go with you!”
“No. You can’t do that either. I must talk to her alone.”
Philip swayed to keep his feet in the crush.
“So help me,” he began, “if I didn’t know you were old enough to be Aud’s father …!”
“I’m not quite as old as all that, you know.” Brian found himself talking more loudly than was necessary. “This way; do you mind?”
It might be quieter away from the centre of noise. Brian impelled his companion down past the length of the bar, where spectators stood on the rungs of bar-stools to peer over the heads of others. At the end of it, between the angle of the bar and a heavily curtained window overlooking the street, he spoke again.
“At any other time, I might feel inclined to give you some competition. Not now. I have no more interest in Audrey than I have in—in Paula Catford.”
(Now why had he said those last words?)
“You want me to say good-night to Aud here and now?”
“I don’t even want you to say good
-night. Let me take the message for you; that’s even more important. When you understand the reason for all this, which may be quite soon, you’ll see it’s just as vital to you as it is to Audrey. If you care for her, you’ll go.”
Brian paused. He looked once, and looked again.
In the dim corner beyond the bar sat his friend Dr. Gideon Fell.
A mountain in the corner, his bandit’s moustache drawn down above several chins, his eyeglasses askew on the broad black ribbon, Dr. Fell cleared his throat with a rumbling noise that could be heard even here. He had an intent expression on his face and a large glass of Carlsberg lager in his hand.
“Sir,” he said courteously to Philip Ferrier, “may I urge you to do as Innes asks?”
“So-and-so!” breathed Philip, and tugged at his collar. “Can I depend on this?”
“You can,” said Brian, “and you know it. How soon is this first show over?”
“At any minute. We were going after that. The bill—”
“I’ll pay the bill. Try to believe Audrey’s future may depend on your going home now and asking no questions. You can ’phone her later, or she’ll ’phone you. Well?”
A slight hysteria had infected the night-club. Philip, a dazed young man who liked to feel he was being heroic, tried to take a last look in Audrey’s direction. Then he elbowed round and stalked away. Dr. Fell, glooming down over the mountainous ridges of himself, held up the glass of beer like a powerfully impressive television commercial.
“Sir,” Dr. Fell intoned with stately thunder, “I myself can refrain from asking questions in the event of necessity. However! In one word, what explains all this?”
“In one word: vitriol.”
“Oh, ah?”
“That’s not the only word, but it will do. You don’t put vitriol into a perfume-bottle as a joke.”
Dr. Fell’s eyes slid sideways.
“Not customarily, I agree. But I find the word vitriol less interesting than … harrumph! No matter! Go and see to the young lady.”
From the dance-floor, which was now invisible, a thump and angry cries rocked the house as the Apache shot feet-first into another party. Brian, butting his way through the crowd, emerged at the edge of the dance-floor.
In Spite of Thunder Page 5