“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.
XVII
THE 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.
Two voices spoke from inside the study. One was that of Sir Gerald Hathaway. The other was that of Dr. Gideon Fell.
“—the method,” said Hathaway, “the indisputable method, which was used to commit both these murders.”
“Which murders?” asked Dr. Fell.
“This is stupidity. Come! This is stupidity at its worst and most futile limit. Do I need to explain which murders?”
“Sir, I think you had better.”
There were three persons in the study, the third being Paula Catford.
Hathaway and Dr. Fell, at least, were so engrossed that neither appeared to notice Brian as he went in. Another nasty jolt awaited him.
Though there were no shutters for the full-length windows at the rear of the villa, facing north above ravine and massed trees, the white semi-transparent curtains had been drawn on the study windows. The sun did not enter. It could not be called dark; only faintly shadowed, blurring outlines.
Against the east wall stood the big writing-table, its chromium desk-lamp not burning, but in a position to send a glow downward on the pile of manuscript underneath. Against the west wall, above the mantelpiece, ticked the white-faced clock. Round apple-green walls, covered with framed photographs where the space was not occupied by irregular bookshelves, a little filtered light slipped and swayed with the trembling of the curtains.
But there was a difference in the room’s appearance.
Dr. Fell, in a big easy-chair, sat with his back to the windows. Into the middle of the study had been pushed a small circular table, and Hathaway stood beside it. Paula Catford, sick with fright, stood near the mantelpiece and looked at two articles lying on the table: a small automatic pistol and a collapsed face-and-head mask of tinted rubber, round which curled a mass of real fair hair.
“Someone wore this,” said Hathaway. “Someone wore it last night. You tell me so.”
“Yes,” agreed Dr. Fell.
Hathaway picked up the mask, fitting it over the curved back of his right hand. Eve Ferrier’s face took form above the table.
“Someone, you are further pleased to tell me, followed Audrey Page to a place called the Cave of the Witches. This mask—”
“Put it down!” said Paula. “Please, for heaven’s sake, put it down!”
Hathaway whirled round.
“You must forgive me, dear lady, if I distress you. But the clear-eyed innocence of your deceit, on Thursday night, leaves me no choice. What did you say, at that time, of Mr. Desmond Ferrier? ‘I don’t know him well.’ Now you acknowledge, to the Director of Police, you’ve been his fondest worshipper for years?”
“Yes. It’s true. Now put down that mask!”
“No,” said Dr. Fell.
“It’s not true? Yet you told me. … ”
“The mask and the pistol, it would seem, were taken and returned. Agreed.”
“And the person who took them was the murderer?”
“Oh, ah. We must believe so. But what makes you so sure that the murderer was following Audrey Page?”
Hathaway’s bald head jerked against the whitish glow from the windows. His moustache, his close-cut grey beard, even his face seemed to writhe in intellectual agony.
“Am I being deceived again? I was promised facts.”
“True. Since you insist on making out your case, at whatever cost to the feelings of anyone present, Aubertin has allowed you to do so. He has not allowed you to draw unwarranted conclusions from the evidence.”
“Someone’s feelings? Tchaa! I follow truth.”
“Wherever it leads us?”
“Yes!”
“Sir, Miss Page was not killed. She was not even hurt. We shall never be dazzled by your intellect if you weave dreams only from the occurrences in the Cave of the Witches.” Dr. Fell sat up a little. “You have said ‘murder’; you have said ‘murderer.’ The sole murder with which we deal is Mrs. Ferrier’s. If there is an indisputable explanation for that, let us hear it.”
“Am I to be dealt fairly with?”
“By thunder, you are!”
Hathaway, bristling, pointed a stubby forefinger.
“And yet, for whatever reason,” he shot back, “Audrey Page is being kept from me. If I am to make a reconstruction, which I flatter myself will be better than any reconstruction you yourself have ever made, I must have someone who was on the spot and saw for himself. I must have Brian Innes, at least. Where is Innes?”
“He’s here,” Brian answered from the doorway.
“Ah!” murmured Hathaway with a pounce of triumph.
Still holding up the mask with his left hand inside it, turning it round so that it faced towards Paula, he bent on Brian a look at once excited and faintly derisive.
“Come in, my dear fellow! Come in!”
“But don’t, I beg of you,” interposed Dr. Fell, “close that door when you enter. Leave it an inch or two open. Yes; like that.”
All three of them, Hathaway and Dr. Fell and Paula, looked round at him in the whitish half-gloom.
“My dear fellow,” Hathaway addressed Brian with avuncular tenderness, “your sins have found you out. The authorities know. They know what went on in this room when Mrs. Ferrier had her quarrel with Audrey Page yesterday morning.”
“Then they know more than I do.”
“Oblige me,” cried Hathaway, waving the mask, “by not quibbling. Are you prepared to be honest at long last?”
“If you want me to answer questions, I’m ready.”
Hathaway nodded. He put down the mask on the table, beside the little gleaming metal shape of the automatic pistol. Next, with quick bustling steps, he went towards the writing-table. But he did not stop there. After what seemed to be a glance at the manuscript lying stacked tidily under the desk-lamp, he reached up and plucked down two books from a shelf above and to the right of it.
Nobody else moved. Dr. Fell, sitting back as though sleepily in the big chair, was not sleepy at all. He was watching.
Hathaway returned to the centre-table with the two books, one a small and thin one, the other large and red-bound.
“Murrell on Poisons,”* he announced, holding up the small book. “The second one,” he held it up, “another of the admirable volumes by Dr. Thompson.† Both the property of the late Eve Ferrier, as we see by her name written on the fly-leaf of each. I hadn’t really hoped to find them here. But I am not surprised to find them. Eh, Miss Catford?”
Paula said nothing.
Hathaway, putting both books down on the table, looked at Brian with shoulders hunched and beard out-thrust.
“Dear young man! Yesterday morning, at about nine o’clock, you ran upstairs to this room. If at any time up to this morning I had been told what you knew (only what you knew!), this affair would have been even simpler than it is. The murderer, we all agree, concocted a plot to kill Mrs. Ferrier. The design was to create a ‘murder by magic,’ a real impossible situation—”
“No,” said Dr. Fell in a voice like a pistol-shot.
Hathaway pounced round in the other direction.
“You deny that, dear doctor? You deny the murderer was trying to reproduce exactly what had happened at Berchtesgaden seventeen years before?”
“I deny it.”
“Indeed, now? Explain yourself!”
“Sir, I think not.” Dr. Fell raised his voice. “Some time ago you spotted the method of Mrs. Ferrier’s murder, anticipating my own feebler wits—”
“Ah! You confess yourself anticipated and beaten?”
“Easily.”
“That’s gratifying. Come, that’s very gratifying! You bungled badly at the very start, dear doctor; confession is good for the soul. Others did a little better.”
Hathaway, shivering, pointed at Brian.
“Now Innes there, though ill-mannered and unobservant, is not without a gleam or two of perception when he puts his mind to it. His theory of a poisoned cigarette, as quoted by Miss Catford, was wrong and mistaken. But it was closer to truth than any effort we have heard so far.
“From Murrell,” and Hathaway held up the book, “we learn a good many facts about nitrobenzene, which is also variously known as oil of bitter almonds and essence of mirbane and finally as benzaldehyde. If the fumes of its vapour are inhaled for any length of time, even in the open air, it is as deadly as when the liquid is swallowed. This occurred even to Innes. Eh, young man?”
Brian put down his wrath.
“Outside the door of this study,” he said, “I could tell something was wrong with Mrs. Ferrier. That’s true enough, as far as it goes!”
“Wrong? Be more explicit!”
“She was talking wildly. To me she sounded like a woman sleepwalking. To Audrey she sounded like a woman hypnotized. She ran at the rail of the balcony and grabbed at her throat just before she fell. But how could she have been poisoned at the breakfast-table?”
“She was not poisoned at the breakfast-table. Your stupidity …”
“Hathaway, stop this damned bragging.”
“I never brag. I state truths.” Again the other pointed. “You will henceforward be frank with me. I don’t want your opinions; I don’t want your comments. I want merely an answer, yes or no, to what I shall ask. Ready?”
“Go ahead.”
“It was Mrs. Ferrier’s habit, wasn’t it, to work in this room every morning after breakfast?”
“Yes!”
“Nobody else used the room? It was her particular domain?”
“That’s what I’m told, anyway.”
“It was her habit, wasn’t it, to lock and bolt that door to the hall so that nobody could disturb her? Mrs. Ferrier sat at the writing-table (there; look at it!), and wrote in longhand with a fountain-pen?”
“Well, she was there yesterday morning when Audrey looked in at the window.”
“Ah! When Audrey Page looked in at the window! I don’t want your comments; but I allow that one. And, when Audrey Page looked in at the window, hadn’t Mrs. Ferrier been sitting at the writing-table for nearly an hour and a half?”
“Yes. But—”
“No comments, I say! What else do we know about the lady? Didn’t she invariably (invariably!) wear too much perfume? Didn’t we ourselves notice this from twelve feet away, on the previous night at the Hotel du Rhône? Wasn’t this perfume called Spectre de la Rose, a heavy distillation which would blend with another rose-fragrance and blot out any fainter, alien odour? Yes or no?”
&nbs
p; “Yes!”
“On the other hand,” said Hathaway, “wasn’t there a strong breeze yesterday morning? Blowing through this room? Blowing through two open windows? Dissipating all rose-odours except to one who might be leaning directly above them or beside them?”
“Leaning directly above or beside what?”
“Fool!”
“It’s no answer just to—”
“Fool!” repeated Hathaway, his eyes glittering. “Recall what I told you (I myself!) of Eve Ferrier’s tour through Germany in 1930. While she travelled with Hector Matthews at her side, they were constantly presenting her with a certain gift. Remember?”
“Yes. You said—”
“And, when she was presented with this gift, Mrs. Ferrier herself never carried it. She gave it to Matthews. He carried it for her. Now return to this room, seventeen years later. Look round for the trap that was set. Don’t you see, my fatuous jester, that the secret of Mrs. Ferrier’s murder may be stated in just two words?”
“What two words?”
“I will show you.”
Paula Catford cried out an anguished protest. It did not stop Hathaway.
Bouncing, dedicated, he hurried over to the big writing-table. He stretched out his hand and switched on the chromium desk-lamp.
Against whitish gloom the yellow light shone out clearly. Though it left much of the surroundings in darkness, it showed with vivid effect what Brian had observed yesterday. Just to the left of the desk-blotter and the manuscript stood a glass ashtray. Just to the right of the desk-blotter and the manuscript, even more apparent, stood a bowl of roses.
“What two words, you ask?”
The breath whistled thinly through Hathaway’s nostrils. Delicately, with trembling hands, he picked up the china bowl with its red roses. Still delicately, afire with triumph, he marched back to the centre table and put down the bowl there.
“Poisoned flowers,” he said.
* Murrell’s What to Do in Cases of Poisoning, 15th edition (London: H. K. Lewis, 1944).
† Poisons and Poisoners, by C. J. S. Thompson, M.B.E. (London: Harold Shaylor, 1931).
XVIII
“THOSE FLOWERS?” BRIAN demanded.
In Spite of Thunder Page 19