by Ann Bridge
Antrobus heard her.
‘Clear off, Julia—the key’s in the car. Take that thing away—Colin will see to me.’
This told Julia that Antrobus, in spite of his struggles with Wright, realised that Colin had passed her the black brief-case. For a moment she hesitated—there was John, pouring with blood before her eyes; could she leave him? It was in fact Borovali who decided her to do what Antrobus asked—he wheeled round on her, saying—‘It is you who took my weapon?’
‘Goodness no! What weapon?’ But Julia was full of a blind instinctive rage—at the injury to Antrobus, and at all these crooks who had brought it about; above all she was furious with the German woman. Even as she spoke she stepped past Borovali and snatched the vast tartan bag off the fat creature’s arm, and then turned and ran like a deer down the plank-walk into the tunnel, leaving the others staring after her.
She ran all the way through the tunnel too—only when she was approaching the exit did she slow down. Oh gracious, would the man want her ticket? John had got them. But the official at the gate was busy with a swarm of tourists eager to enter, and when she said, ‘Just now I came in with the Englischer Herr,’ he let her pass.
In the open restaurant the first person she saw was Chambertin, no longer sitting at a table but standing talking with two other men, one of whom she recognised as Müller, the detective who had sat in the Gemsbock garden, and shadowed Wright and Borovali to the police-station. She hurried over to them.
‘Monsieur Chambertin, can you get hold of a doctor? Mr. Antrobus has been shot.’
‘Shot? Where?’
‘In the leg,’ Julia said idiotically, thinking only of Antrobus.
‘But in what circumstances?’ Chambertin asked, looking concerned.
‘Oh, by those ruffians in there—in the gorge. And one of them is in the river,’ she added needlessly, with a rather hysterical laugh.
The man who was not Müller rounded sharply on her.
‘How came he in the river, Fräulein?’
‘Oh, go in and ask! There are dozens of people in there who saw it all.’ She turned to Chambertin. ‘But do get a doctor quickly, can’t you? He may bleed to death,’ she said urgently, and started away towards the car-park.
Chambertin followed her, and while she was fiddling with the controls on the dash-board of Antrobus’s big Porsche, all completely unfamiliar to her, he poked his head in at the window.
‘And you, Mademoiselle? Where do you go now?’
‘But to my hotel. I have a friend there, an elderly English lady, who is unwell. I must get back to her.’
‘Your hotel is in Interlaken?’
Julia noticed that the man who had asked her how Wright came to be in the river had also come up to the car, and stood beside Chambertin, listening intently. Was this the Swiss police chief, von Allmen or whatever his name was, who had given away the business of the bus-tour to Chambertin? Anyhow she could only speak the truth.
‘No, up at Beatenberg—the Silberhorn. Goodbye, Monsieur Chambertin—do please get a doctor at once.’ She let in the clutch and shot away out of the car-park.
Spinning down the road towards Meiringen, through it, and on towards Brienz Julia, in spite of her anxiety about Antrobus, began to do some hard thinking. Since she had got both the brief-case and the German lady’s tartan bag presumably she had got the papers, there on the seat beside her in the car—including the documents which John didn’t want the Swiss police to see. And John had entrusted her with the job of taking them away, and ‘clearing off’. Well she had cleared off; but she would like to find out as soon as possible if she really had got ‘the doings’, as she privately phrased it; and then she must think of somewhere to put them. If the third man with Chambertin was the Interlaken Chief of Police, or any form of police, he now knew her address, and nothing could stop him from searching the hotel. Oh dear!
Brienz has a rather narrow street, which on fine weekends is apt to be jammed with cars. Julia was more than once brought to a halt where single-line traffic was coming towards her—and she noticed in her driving-mirror that a small grey Volkswagen, with two men in it, was immediately behind her. Through Brienz, in the open country beyond, she slowed down with the idea of looking at the contents of the two cases, and waved the grey Volkswagen on. But it did not pass her—it slowed down too. ‘Oh, bloody police-car, I suppose,’ she muttered irritably, and shot on again.
The Porsche, if pressed, had the legs of the Volkswagen; Julia pressed it, and soon left the smaller car behind and out of sight. Then she again thought hard. Where could she go, short of the Hotel Silberhorn, to examine the contents of the two bags without interruption?
A ladies’ lavatory is one of the few places where a woman can be certain of being alone and undisturbed, and as Julia drove along the shore of the Lake of Brienz she remembered the large, exquisitely clean ‘Ladies’ in the Hotel zum Fluss at Interlaken, which she had visited when she brought Mrs. Hathaway down from the Schynige-Platte, and acquired so much useful information from the hotel porter. The very thing!—moreover, it was not on the direct route to Beatenberg, but lay in the opposite direction, involving a double-back on her tracks, so that it might throw those snoopers in the grey car off the scent. Grinning with satisfaction, she swung over the road bridge across the Aar at Interlaken, turned left, and passing the Englischer Garten with its dull statue and its beautiful silver poplars, pulled in to the open car-park where the Brienz steamers have their landing-stage. The ‘Ladies’ at the Fluss had, she remembered, a separate entrance giving on to this; no need to go through the lounge past the chatty old porter. Grasping both bags, Julia hastened in at the side door, through the outer wash-room, and into one of the actual lavatories; there she bolted the door and began to examine her booty.
She had worried rather on her way as to whether the black brief-case might be locked, but it wasn’t; the two clips sprang up at the touch of her fingers. Eagerly she raised the flap and looked in—to see large quantities of old newspapers! Then it occurred to her that the documents might have been wrapped in these, and she hastily unfolded and shook out every single copy of the Journal de Genève, the Gazette de Lausanne, and the Continental Daily Mail, thinking as she did so that these must represent Borovali’s and Wright’s tastes in newspapers respectively. No—only newspapers. Could everything have gone wrong, and John been wounded for nothing? However, there remained the German lady’s tartan bag—she had already noticed as she carried it in from the car that in spite of the loss of all those comestibles which had been poured out in the Aares-Schlucht it did not feel like an empty bag; in fact it was quite heavy. (At the Aares-Schlucht she had been too hurried and upset to notice anything.) Stuffing the useless newspapers behind the lavatory seat, Julia, her fingers actually trembling, tackled the tartan bag.
In it, just below the broad imitation-leather band which bound the open top there was a second compartment with a zip fastener, running the whole length of one side of the bag. The zip was secured with a silly little imitation-gilt padlock, but it was a cheaply-made affair; Julia fished a tiny nail-file out of her handbag, slipped it through the ring of the padlock, and wrapping her handkerchief round her fingers wrenched the thing off, and pulled back the zip.
Inside she found a very large, stiff, shiny envelope, heavily re-sealed with black wax; as well, bundles and bundles of papers, folded narrow and long, some tied with white tape, others not fastened at all. She examined these first, looking them over rapidly. Julia had been left a considerable fortune by her grandmother, and she was perfectly familiar with the appearance of certificates for debentures, stocks, and shares; the only thing which startled her about these was the colossal size of the figures typed or written in—here was Aglaia’s fortune, and it must be vast. But that was not what John cared about. She turned to the big envelope, and hastily pulled out her Biro pen from her bag—the slender oval end of a Biro is perfect for opening envelopes without tearing them—rolled it along under the flap, crac
king the black wax of the seals, and drew out the contents.
‘Blue-prints’, a word so casually used in the press for any project for the future, when they are scientific and technical really are blue—blue, with the design for the machine or plan showing up on them in white lines. Such sheets, just as June had described them, Julia, sitting on the lavatory seat in the Hotel zum Fluss, now unfolded—and then most carefully folded up again along their original creases. With things like these she was quite unfamiliar; she had no idea whether she was looking at the plans for a nuclear-powered submarine tanker or for the pumps on an underground pipe-line from Kirkuk to Iskenderun, emerging into the Mediterranean on Turkish soil. The drawings of one or two large bulbous-looking objects reminded her, vaguely, of Colin’s account of the huge under-water containers in which food for man and beast was even now stored in the green depths of the lakes of Thun and Brienz—but this could hardly interest the Swiss. She was faintly intrigued, too, by another set of papers, drawn in ink on bluish paper with a linen pattern; but these seemed merely to be duplicates of the blue-prints. What she did realise was that she had got, here, under her hand, the documents that both John and Colin were so desperately anxious to secure; and she must, absolutely must, somehow contrive to hand them over to one or the other without letting the Swiss police, or anyone else, see them first.
It struck her at once that this might not be so easy. Whether or not the grey Volkswagen was a police-car it had been on her tail, and knew the number of the Porsche; if it was not a police-car, but belonged to some nefarious associates of Borovali or the two Germans, so much the worse. But in any case Chambertin and the man with him knew that she was staying at the Silberhorn, and nothing could stop the Swiss police from—perfectly properly—searching her room for missing property.
Julia considered. The blue-prints were much too big to be stuffed down her bosom, in the good romantic manner, and her own handbag was too small to accommodate them. She did some more thinking. Some people say they think best in their bath; Julia thought to quite good effect, perched on the seat in a ladies’ lavatory. What Chambertin—and hence the Swiss police—really wanted was Mr. Thalassides’ fortune, entrusted to the Banque Républicaine and, by fraud, stolen. Good—they should have it; sooner or later they would have to hand it over to Aglaia Armitage anyhow. She picked up the certificates representing that fortune from the tesselated floor, where she had left them while she looked at the blue-prints, placed them in the black brief-case, and snapped it to; then she replaced the stiff envelope containing the blue-prints in the inner compartment of the tartan bag.
‘One for John, one for the Swiss,’ she murmured, gurgling—for an idea had come to her about the disposal of the tartan bag which made her laugh. She looked at her watch—twenty to six. There ought to be time, if Colin got back fairly soon. Carrying her three bags, she went out to the Porsche.
Julia had guessed—rightly, as it happened—that if the grey Volkswagen was a police-car it would go straight on up to Beatenberg, and look for her at the Hotel Silberhorn; its occupants could have no means of knowing that she had doubled back to the Fluss. There was no sign of it on the parking-place by the quay when she left the hotel, nor on the Bahnhof-Platz by the West Station—she looked carefully there as she passed, and then drove on, as fast as the low-hung Porsche could take the hairpin bends, up through the scented woods to Beatenberg.
But she didn’t go to the hotel. Instead she drove into the big lay-by at the foot of the Sessel-Bahn, left the car, and went up the zigzag path to the little station. She took a ticket to the Niederhorn itself, and was soon swinging up between the tree-tops, through evening air sweet with scents drawn out from grass and flower and tree during the long warm day—and as she sat swaying she took out the local bus time-table, which had on the back the hours during which the Sessel-Bahn was open. Yes, passenger traffic went on up to 20.30 hours, i.e. till 8.30 p.m.—how tiresome the continental habit was of having no a.m. and p.m.; one always had to do these complicated sums! It was now nearly a quarter to seven—that was cutting it pretty fine; please God Colin did somehow come to the hotel at once. If he didn’t, she would just have to come up again alone.
At the mid-way station, where the twin seats are pulled round by hand from the lower steel cable to the upper one Julia, with her three bags, asked to be let out.
‘The Fräulein does not go on to the Gipfel?’ the man in dungarees, who was conducting this manoeuvre, asked in surprise.
‘No, not tonight.’ While he was slinging two more seats round the curved rails she walked over to the group of milk-churns which stood in a far corner, ready, as she had learned, to carry water up to the hotel on the summit when the passenger traffic was over for the day. Lifting the lid of the remotest churn of all she slightly bent the tartan bag and stuffed it into this odd receptacle; then she replaced the lid, and walked back to the man in dungarees.
‘Do you use all the churns now, to carry up the water at night?’ she asked casually, when a pause occurred in the traffic.
‘Ah, Fräulein, no; not now—this is not the high season. In July and August, yes; sometimes we are loading these vessels till after midnight! But at present it is not so bad.’
‘So how many containers do you use now?’
‘Oh, it varies—but certainly not all. We fill these nearest ones, and load them up; the hotel sends down word how many they need.’
This satisfied Julia. It was highly unlikely that the blueprints would be soused, even if she and Colin were a little late. She got onto the next seat that came down empty, and was carried away through the bright air, down to the road and the car; then she drove on to the Silberhorn.
There were three cars drawn up on the gravelled space outside the hotel, where normally there were none except at lunch-time—one was a grey Volkswagen. Grinning a little, Julia avoided the main entrance and went in by a little door which led directly into the bar; there she encountered Fräulein Hanna, who left off polishing glasses, took her arm, and led her with a certain urgency out into the long broad corridor which served as a hall.
‘Fräulein Probyn, the Polizei are here again!’ she said agitatedly. ‘And another gentleman also.’
‘Are they? What are they doing?’ Julia asked. As she spoke she hung the black brief-case up on one of the many coat-hooks which adorned the hall on both sides, and slung her wind-cheater over it.
‘They speak with Frau Hathaway; but they have asked first for you.’
‘Where are they?’
‘In the garden.’
‘Is the Herr Monro here?’
‘No.’
Julia walked quickly through the Kleine Saal into the garden. It was nearly half past seven; Mrs. Hathaway ought not to be out too late—and she ought not to be worried.
Mrs. Hathaway, however, did not appear to be in the least worried when Julia reached the garden; she seemed to be having a party. Chambertin and the man Julia had seen with him at the Aares-Schlucht restaurant were sitting by the old lady, drinking Cinzano and laughing; Müller, the detective, and two other men sat at another table, trying to make conversation with Watkins, who was refilling their glasses.
‘Oh my dear child, there you are at last! These gentlemen have been wondering what had become of you; they want to see you about something, it seems. I gather you already know Monsieur Chambertin—and this is Herr von Allmen, the Chief of Police in Interlaken.’ Nothing could have been easier than her voice and manner.
‘So I had guessed,’ Julia said rather coldly as she returned von Allmen’s bow. ‘But look, Mrs. H. darling, you don’t want to get chilly after your illness—now that I’m here, hadn’t you better go in and get some dinner? It’s quite late.’
‘Oh no—we’re having such fun. Aren’t we?’ she asked of her two guests. ‘And I’m sure they won’t mind my hearing whatever it is they want to ask you about.’
It was obvious to Julia that both men did mind considerably being forced to interview her in the old
lady’s presence, and she knew Mrs. Hathaway well enough to be sure that she realised this too, and was doing it on purpose. She rejoiced at Chambertin and von Allmen’s evident embarrassment.
‘Before anything else,’ she said to Chambertin, ‘please tell me about Monsieur Antrobus. Where is he? Has a doctor seen him?’
‘Yes, Mademoiselle. It so happened that there was an English infirmière in a party of toursts who were passing through the gorge when’—he coughed—‘when the accident happened;she attended to Monsieur Antrobus at once, and put on a tourniquet. Meanwhile we had telephoned to Meiringen for a doctor and an ambulance, and he was brought out with the least possible delay; he was carried very carefully—our brancardiers are excellent.’
Julia was enormously relieved at this news, though the idea of an English hospital-nurse in holiday rig coping with John on the plank-walk struck her as distinctly funny. But the mention of a tourniquet worried her—that sounded as though the bullet had punctured an artery.
‘Where is he now?’ she asked again.
‘In Dr. Hertz’s Clinic down in the town, here. He expressed a very strong desire to be in Interlaken rather than at Meiringen.’
‘Oh, I’m so glad. He’ll be perfectly all right with Hertz,’ Julia said happily.
‘You know the Herr Doktor Hertz?’ von Allmen asked, looking surprised.
‘Yes. But now, Monsieur Chambertin, what is it that you and the Chief of Police wish to ask me about? I don’t want to keep Madame Hathaway out of doors too long. And oh darling Mrs. H., could I have a Cinzano too? It’s been such a day.’
‘Watkins, you haven’t given Miss Julia anything to drink,’ Mrs. Hathaway said mildly.