In Spite of Thunder

by John Dickson Carr

  “In getting Audrey arrested for murder?”

  “She’s not going to be arrested. Will you at least not speak,” and Paula seized the lapels of his coat, “until I’ve said one thing to Desmond? Just one thing? No; don’t answer! Don’t answer! This way.”

  The accordion-music, the buffet of voices, smote them as they stumbled down the steps, past a heavy door which Paula opened, along a corridor, and down a few more steps on the right.

  “Madame and monsieur,” a woman’s voice shrieked in French. “Be welcome. Be very welcome among us.”

  Brian’s first impulse, which was to laugh at the incongruity, did not long remain.

  In a fairly large cellar built to resemble a rock cave with grottoes and thick pillars, six or seven earnest couples were dancing to the bleat of the accordion. Except that a few were middle-aged, they might have been enthusiastic young men and women at a dance-hall in Hammersmith or Tottenham Court Road.

  Then Brian saw the wall-decorations. He also saw the hostess.

  A muffled, morbid beat stung the enthusiasm even before accordion had been drowned out by drum, trumpet, and piano. Grotesque effects, even claptrap ones, are gained through the emotions of those who see them. These dancers were captivated.

  In very dim light the hostess, whose thoroughly displayed figure contrasted with her bloodless face and wide-open mouth and the mark of the sword-cut through her neck, swam up at them and looked.

  “A table? A table for monsieur and madame? A table?”

  You did not notice that the hostess wore a mask until she thrust her face into yours. Paula, taking fright for all her casualness, shied back.

  “They’re not here,” Brian said. “Audrey and your boy-friend. They’re not here.”

  “They’re bound to be here!”

  A shriek of discordant laughter, uttered by a machine like most of civilization’s laughter, shook out above that music. It gave Brian the impression, fortunately only for a moment, that the people were not human either.

  “Well, look for yourself,” he shouted above the din. “You can see every—”

  “There! Under the painting of the three vampires with their victim.”

  “A table?”

  “Yes, a table.” He was about to ask whether they could get something to eat, but changed his mind. “Over there! The one over there.”

  Somebody, who had taken too much to drink, fell over one of these tables. They were ranged round the pillars or against the walls. Audrey Page and Desmond Ferrier sat facing each other, their heads together, Audrey talking quickly and her companion seeming to deny every word she spoke.

  “Wait!” said Paula.

  Brian did not wait. He stalked past the hostess and reached that table by the wall. He could not hear Audrey’s last words, or the exclamation Ferrier uttered.

  But he saw Audrey’s scared, startled countenance as she looked up. He saw Ferrier’s expression, one of guilt and near-consternation too spontaneous to be hidden. Rising up so that the chair fell over behind him, Ferrier said one full-throated word which was lost in the crescendo of the music.

  And then the music stopped dead. Every hostess (there were six of them, in various states of mask and dress) inexplicably vanished as though she had never existed. Soft greenish light broadened and brightened under the grottoes.

  And every illusion vanished too. Except for those curious paintings round the walls, the cavern became a commonplace night-club full of rather unfashionable suburbanites applauding the music and chatting their way back to tables covered with red-and-white cloths.

  “Good evening, old boy,” Desmond Ferrier said agreeably. “Quite a surprise, seeing you here. Sit down, won’t you?”

  Brian, whose head swam a little from the heat or some other cause, did not answer.

  “Sit down, won’t you?” Ferrier invited again. “They won’t serve a meal after ten o’clock, but you look as though you could do with a sandwich. Care for one?”

  “Thanks,” said Brian, matching his tone.

  “Something to drink?”

  “Thanks.”

  But such a brittle surface must crack under strain; the atmosphere was wrong for it.

  Despite thrifty visitors nursing a small brandy or a glass of beer, despite metal ashtrays stamped in practical Woolworth fashion with La Caverne des Sorcières, 16 rue Jean Janvier, the big paintings would not be banished.

  They lined the walls. They were softly lighted. For all their bad drawing, for all their too-lurid colours and too-intricate detail, they had a clumsy power which breathed images into the mind. Young witches and old crones adored Satan. There was one canvas, on the would-be nursery subject of Bluebeard and his wives, which gave Brian bad dreams several times in the future.

  “Sit down, won’t you?” Ferrier repeated in too loud a voice.

  “No. I don’t think either of us will sit down just yet.” It was Paula who intervened. “Desmond, this can’t go on. I’ve been talking to Brian here.” She paused. “He knows.”

  “Knows what?”

  “This morning,” Paula replied in a thin voice, “you told me not to be wilfully obtuse. I wish you wouldn’t be obtuse either. If Brian guesses, the police have guessed too. Why don’t you tell them that yesterday evening, at least between a little past seven and a little past ten, you were with me in my room at the Hotel du Rhône?”

  Nobody spoke while you might have counted ten.

  Audrey Page rose slowly to her feet. Paula, after an effort to speak those words without being self-conscious of them, had gone pink in the face and stood rigid. But Ferrier, instead of treating this lightly, made the motions of one who fights through fog.

  Gaunt-seeming, drawn up in a fuzzy dark suit and black tie, with his hooded eyes and aquiline nose and broad mouth no longer mocking, he stood outlined against the flesh of vampires on the canvas behind him.

  “Now why don’t I tell ’em, eh?” he demanded. “What about yesterday afternoon? Why don’t I tell ’em that yesterday afternoon, between whatever hours you like, I was in Audrey’s room at the Hotel Metropole?”

  “Desmond!” screamed Paula.

  “I don’t tell ’em that,” Ferrier shouted, “because it’s not true. Neither is your story about the Hotel du Rhône.”

  Paula stared at him.

  “There’s no need to shield …”

  “Who’s shielding anybody?” asked Ferrier, with his face in a paroxysm and sweat on his forehead in the dim greenish light. “I’ve played in many things in my time, but never in bedroom farce. Can’t you two women think in terms of anything else?”

  “And yet,” intervened Brian, who was looking hard at that curiously contorted expression, “that’s just what it is. It’s murder; it’s the most serious crime in the world; but it’s a bedroom farce that depends on a missing husband.”

  “What are you talking about? What concern is it of yours?”

  “It’s no concern at all of mine. You can sleep with as many damn women as you like.” Suddenly Brian seized Ferrier by the collar, twisted the grip round, and flung him back against the wall. “But what’s this about you wanting to frighten Audrey?”

  Ferrier’s gaunt shoulders whacked against the painting, which slid partly sideways. A bottle went over on the table. And then, after that brief explosion of violence, when several spectators thought it amusing byplay and applauded, both of them controlled themselves.

  Ferrier, a man half out of his wits, stood straightening his necktie with the world also beyond all control

  “Frighten Audrey? Are you scatty?”

  “I said it,” Paula cried out, “but I didn’t really mean it. I mean, I didn’t know it was the truth. That is—”

  Paula stopped, evidently not knowing what she meant.

  “Mr. Ferrier,” Brian said formally, tugging at his own collar, “I beg your pardon. We don’t seem to be acting like civilized human beings.”

  And Ferrier suddenly shouted with his old laughter.

&nb
sp; “That’s fair enough, old boy. But I’m glad you said it. For honour’s sake I should have had to have a crack back at you; and I’m not as young as I once was.”

  Then, though he was still mocking himself, his whole voice and bearing altered. It took on a terrifying air of the regal and the stately; even his features seemed to alter in that dim light.

  Soft you! a word or two before you go.

  I have done the state some service, and they know’t—

  No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,

  When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

  Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,

  Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak

  Of one who loved not wisely, but too well;

  Whereupon the voice dropped to its normal tone, shattering illusion with a twist of sarcasm.

  “Or, as Othello didn’t say, a poor bastard who seems unwisely to have loved everybody in sight. I wasn’t frightening Audrey, you clot. If anything, she was frightening me.”

  “What’s that?”

  Audrey’s exclamation of, “This isn’t funny,” was instantly cut short.

  “I agree it isn’t, little one.” Ferrier looked at Brian. “She’s been questioning me like Aubertin and Dr. Fell themselves.”

  “Yes, I’ve been asking him questions,” Audrey said in despair. “But I haven’t heard much in return, even though I’ve been utterly and absolutely frank to make him speak. And I have been frank about this morning, Brian.”

  Once more the threat of disaster spread its wings. Or was it really disaster?

  “You told him …?”

  “I told him I was with Eve in the study. I told him Eve and I had the most awful row. I told him Eve accused me of stealing her husband, though I’m not sure now she meant Mr. Ferrier. I told him Eve ran after me out on the balcony. I’ve admitted I was alone with Eve when she fell.”

  Paula said nothing; Paula only looked. After all, she knew the whole story.

  On the table between Audrey and Ferrier lay the remains of a sketchy dinner together with two bottles of Burgundy. One of these bottles, empty, had been knocked over. Ferrier, picking up the other bottle without troubling about a glass, tilted it to his mouth and seemed less to swallow than to inhale.

  “Have a drink!” he suggested, and thumped the bottle down. “By the way, Innes, what do they do to you in this country if you’re convicted of murder? There’s no death-penalty, is there?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What do you mean, not yet? Are they reversing the English process and introducing a death-penalty instead of abolishing it?”

  “Never mind! The point is—”

  “The point is,” said Ferrier, who was reasonably tight already, “I didn’t realize the dense extent of my trouble this morning. If there was a hypothetical case against Audrey and me twelve hours ago, it gives me green goose-pimples to think what would have happened if Aubertin and Dr. Fell had known all the rest of it.”

  “Dr. Fell did know.”

  “Hey?”

  “I said Dr. Fell did know. He promised to help you, and he’s made me promise too. Don’t complain too much; you’ve had incredible luck so far.”

  “So I’ve had incredible luck, eh? I’ve had incredible luck, the joker says! When in walks my dearest Paula, not five minutes ago, and blows the gaff on certain alleged relations at the Hotel du Rhône. Whether I’m convicted of murdering my dear wife because of one sweet charmer at the Hotel Metropole, or convicted of murdering her because of another sweet charmer at the Hotel du Rhône, it won’t make very much difference when the jury bring in their verdict.”

  Paula, hardly breathing, began one speech and ended with another.

  “You can’t think of anyone but yourself, can you? And all the time, all the silly, romantic, devoted time, I thought …!”

  “You thought what?” Ferrier asked quickly.

  “It really doesn’t matter.”

  “Get this straight, my pet.” Ferrier spoke with a sick, ironic intensity. “I am your utter and single-minded bond-slave. I kiss your ankles—and vertically.”

  “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

  “Oh, no. I’ve never deceived you. I never will. But I can’t see any way out of this mess without landing in chokey. Who the hell can help any of us now?”

  “Possibly I can,” said Brian Innes.

  “Ho? With all due respect, old boy …”

  (“So now,” Brian was reflecting with some irony, “I am nobly going to the rescue of the man I wanted to jump on with both feet, just as in the melodramas he used to play.”)

  But none of this showed in Brian’s manner.

  “Listen to me,” he said aloud. “This situation may not be as bad as you think. Audrey was asking you some questions, was she?”

  “Yes! What about it?”

  “Right. If you’ll tell the truth about a few things here and now, and Audrey feels up to telling us about breakfast this morning …”

  “About breakfast?”

  “That’s what I said. If both of you will do that, we may be able to nab the murderer independently of the police and even of Dr. Fell.”

  Paula glanced at him quickly. Audrey kept her gaze on the table. Ferrier, picking up the bottle again and draining it in one monumental swill, gave him a hard, wary look before putting down the empty bottle.

  “Did I invite any of you to have a drink?” he asked. “No; wait. We can’t get service until the lights go down and the witches return. But look here: if you’re assuming the role of Great Detective, lately played by Sir Gerald Hathaway …”

  “I’m not assuming the role of great detective. I can’t pretend to it.”

  “Have it your own way, old boy. All the same! How do you get round the fact that they may arrest Audrey for chucking Eve off that balcony?”

  “Audrey didn’t throw anybody off a balcony. By this time the police know it. Your wife was poisoned, Mr. Ferrier.”

  “Ho?”

  “Your wife was poisoned, I repeat, either at breakfast or before breakfast this morning. That lets you out, because you didn’t come down to breakfast. It lets Paula out; she wasn’t there either. Finally, if Audrey had really poisoned Mrs. Ferrier, would she have hung about to watch the poison work and get suspicion thrown straight at herself?”

  Abruptly, through that imitation cave, the laughter-machine in some grotto uttered its brazen screech of ha-ha-ha. Pleasurable little squeals and cries greeted it from the women guests. Audrey sat down at the table and put her face in her hands.

  “Eve was poisoned?” demanded Ferrier, taking out a silver cigarette case. “How do you know that?”

  “I heard Aubertin and Dr. Fell say so.”

  “Ho? And how was she poisoned?”

  “They didn’t honour me with their confidence. But there’s one possibility, at least. What about the cigarette she was smoking at breakfast?”

  XV

  “CIGARETTE?” FERRIER REPEATED incredulously.

  The sight of his own cigarette-case caught his eye. In a still more feverish mood he put it back in his pocket without opening it.

  “As you’ve been pointing out, old boy,” he added, “I wasn’t at breakfast this morning. I never heard one word about any cigarette. What makes you think it was that?”

  “I don’t think so, necessarily. Maybe the police don’t think so either. The poison may not have been administered at breakfast. Dr. Fell only intimated that; he didn’t say it in so many words. On the other hand, he did indicate it and it’s our only lead.”

  If Brian’s fingernails had been longer, he would have gnawed at them.

  “There’s also the possibility,” he said, “that the police are hiding the trumps in their hand until they can scoop up everything.”

  “Meaning what, old boy?”

  “That she may not have been poisoned at all.”

  “Now take it easy!”

  “Mrs. Ferrier,” said Brian, “may have been s
tabbed with a knife-blade so thin that not a spot of blood showed, and they didn’t find any wound until the police-surgeon examined her. As in the case of the Empress of Austria. Dr. Fell swore this morning that the whole world would know the truth within twenty-four hours.”

  Ha-ha-ha rang the demoniac blare of laughter from its-metal throat, quivering amid tables and bottles.

  Paula Catford made a shivering movement that was too calm for anger.

  “This isn’t helping us, and it’s just a bit silly. Desmond, will you dance with me? I want to talk to you. Will you dance with me?”

  “I can’t dance with you, sweetie-pie, until the band gives us some music. But that merry ha-ha means the effects are beginning; the lights will go down and the band will begin at any minute. Meanwhile, who’s the Empress of Austria? What’s she doing in this?”

  “Nothing,” Brian admitted. “We won’t go into that, because it might bring the guilt straight back to Audrey. Let’s take a more reasonable line. Mr. Ferrier, did you ever hear of a poison called nitrobenzene?”

  And, clearly, Ferrier had.

  He did not attempt to evade or deny. Leaning down to pick up the chair he had knocked over when he first jumped up, he set it back carefully on its legs.

  “Yes, I’ve heard of it. My dear wife’s first husband committed suicide with the stuff. You heard that from Aubertin, didn’t you?”

  “From Aubertin?”

  “Naturally.” Ferrier’s voice held a shade of impatience. “When they questioned us in separate compartments for most of the day, Aubertin startled my ears off by knowing it.”

  “No; I heard it from—”

  About to mention Hathaway’s name, Brian stopped. Ever afterwards, when all truths were plain, he was to remember Paula Catford and Audrey Page as his questions proceeded: Paula standing tall and dark-haired, in a tight-fitting yellow dress, close beside him; Audrey, smaller and more rounded, in brown tweed suit and orange sweater, sitting at the table and suddenly looking up. They spoke almost together.

  Audrey said: “Her first husband?”

  Paula said: “I’m not the only one, it seems, who listens at doors.”

  Ferrier gripped the back of the chair.