Deciding that, at all events, his general direction of progress should be downward, Henry descended the staircase, to find himself not on the ground floor, but on a mezzanine story with no apparent facilities for getting any further down. In every direction, royal blue carpeted corridors stretched away from him, studded with padded white leather doors. Henry felt ridiculous and trapped, like a man lost in a Kafkaesque luxury hotel with no way in or out. From below, the music and babble of the party was just audible. Otherwise, everything was completely quiet.
It was perhaps because of this muffled silence that the sound of a door opening somewhere behind him gave him a sudden shock, and prompted him to react untypically. Furthermore, he had an instinctive revulsion against appearing foolish in this great house where he had been so kindly welcomed, but where he felt fundamentally out of place. In any case, for whatever undefined motive, at the click of the door-latch Henry stepped quickly into an alcove, where, under the protective arms of a white marble goddess standing on a small pedestal, he was out of sight of the opening door.
Instantly he regretted this move. For immediately following the opening of the door came Natasha Hampton’s voice. It was low and ardent, and it said, “No. There’s nobody. Please go now.” And then it said, “Oh, my darling. My darling...” several times over and indistinctly, blurred by passion or tears or perhaps just because Natasha’s golden head was half-buried in somebody’s shoulder. Then distinctly but quietly, she said, “It was a risk. Go now, quickly.”
An undistinguishable masculine voice murmured something, and then Natasha said, very softly, “All right. Just for a minute then. One minute.” The padded door closed with a gentle click, and the corridor was silent again.
Henry stepped out of his hiding place, hating himself. It was nothing to him one way or the other if Natasha Hampton cared to have a lover, but, since his job necessarily involved a great deal of prying into other people’s affairs, Henry was a great respecter of privacy whenever possible. The Hampton façade was smoothly flawless, and it made him cross and unhappy to think that he had, by sheer chance, discovered a rift in it. Besides, he had a feeling that he recognized the man’s voice.
Henry walked back along the corridor in the direction from which he had come, deciding that the only sensible way to find the main staircase was to retrace his steps and start again. He had just begun to climb the short flight of stairs to the next floor when another of the white leather doors behind him opened, and Paul Hampton came out.
“Hello,” remarked Paul, dryly. “Lost your way, Inspector?”
Henry felt himself reddening. “Yes, I’m afraid I have,” he said, lamely. “I must have taken a wrong turning, and...”
“Easy to do, in a rabbit warren like this. You’ve got yourself into our bedroom wing.” Paul smiled. “Come on down and I’ll...”
It was at that moment that the door of Natasha’s room opened again, and John Trapp stepped quickly out into the corridor. Henry felt his stomach muscles contract in an agony of embarrassment. He stood there, as helpless as a spectator in the cinema, while for a long moment the two other men looked at each other in silence. Clearly both of them were shaken off balance and could find no words.
Hampton recovered first, and his voice was light and friendly as he said, “Good God, John. Where did you spring from?”
“Natasha’s room, of course,” said John. A tiny pause. “I’ve been telephoning. I hope you don’t mind. The downstairs line was busy.”
There was another pause. When Paul spoke again, his voice was harder. “My dear man, why should I mind? It was Natasha’s room you invaded, not mine. Where is she, by the way?”
“I don’t know. Downstairs, I suppose.”
“Well, I trust you got your call through.”
John smiled slightly. “No, as a matter of fact I didn’t. But it doesn’t matter. My time wasn’t wasted. There are better things to do than talking on the telephone.” There was a definite, lilting challenge in his voice.
Is the man mad? Henry thought. And then, glancing from one to the other, it flashed through his mind with the clarity of lightning that the shocked silence, the tension, the pathetically thin story about telephoning, were all on his account. Hampton knows, he thought. And John knows that he knows, and everything is managed discreetly and in a civilized manner. If Hampton is angry with John, it’s because he has been careless enough to encounter a stranger. If John was taken aback, it was to see me, not Paul. I’m the one who ought not to be here, who has caused an awkward situation. It was not until some days later that Henry realized that this assessment was not quite accurate. At the time it seemed certain.
“C’mon downstairs, then, both of you,” said Paul. He took John’s arm. “Can’t have my guests wandering all over the house at this hour of night.”
The party downstairs was drawing to its close. Many people, including Bill Parkington, had already left, while others were looking for their host and hostess to say good-by. Natasha, gay as ever, appeared a few minutes later. She and Paul did not even glance at each other, and Henry noticed that she avoided John Trapp rather too carefully.
Henry found Emmy with Alfredo and Gerda. Zwemmer was talking earnestly to a disinterested Moranta who, it appeared, had finally been worsted by Lenoir. The latter had departed some minutes earlier, in company with the celluloid beauty, and headed for a night club. Moranta had clearly been drowning his sorrows in whisky. He tried to persuade Henry and Emmy to go on with him and sample the night life of Geneva.
“It is not yet of midnight,” he announced, in his jagged, heavily accented English. “Is early. Come with me. I know many places.”
Henry and Emmy declined politely. Whereupon Juan, sad but unsurprised, offered at all events to drive them home in the car which he had hired for the period of the conference. There would also be room, he said, for Alfredo and Gerda. In the dwindling group, his pointed omission of John Trapp from his invitation was conspicuous.
“What about you, John?” Paul Hampton asked quickly. “Have you a car?”
“You know very well I haven’t. I’m just a common working man.”
“I’ll call a taxi for you, John,” said Natasha. With so few guests left, she could no longer avoid him completely, but Henry noticed that she kept as far away from him as possible.
“I will drive you home in my car, Mr. Trapp.” Zwemmer, already in his overcoat, rapped the words out, like an order. But Paul Hampton intervened.
“Natasha.” Paul spoke lightly, with only the faintest edge on his voice. “Why don’t you drive John home, darling? You can put the new Renault through her paces for him.” He turned to Henry. “Natasha just got this jalopy last week. She’s pleased as punch with it.” And then, to John, “Forgive me if I don’t come with you. I’m catching a plane for Paris at half past six in the morning, and I haven’t started packing yet.”
Natasha said, “Paris, Paul? You never told me.”
“There are plenty of things I don’t tell you, my sweet, but it so happens that this isn’t one of them. I told you last week.”
“Oh, so you did. I’d forgotten.” There was a tiny pause, and then Natasha went on. “But I dare say John would sooner take a taxi, darling. He knows how badly I drive.”
“No, no.” Paul sounded impatient. “I want to know what he thinks of the Floride. You take him.”
Natasha shrugged. “Very well. If you want me to.”
Henry caught Paul Hampton’s eye for a moment, and saw in it an amused challenge. “You see?” it seemed to say. “Doesn’t this prove that there is nothing between my wife and this man?” He could not help admiring the gesture.
The Spezzis and the Tibbetts said their farewells and went out to Juan’s car. While they were still settling themselves in, Zwemmer drove off in his black Volkswagen, and Natasha and John came out of the house together. Natasha had thrown a dark sable coat over her pale dress. John, deliberately, had chosen to wear an old and crumpled mackintosh. Henry watched t
hem with a mixture of sympathy and irritation as they got into a small pale green Floride and, with Natasha at the wheel, swept away down the drive and out of sight. He wondered, too, about Annette Delacroix and the girl called Sophie; and decided that John Trapp’s life must be rather more complicated than most.
On the terrace, in the gardens, in the reception rooms, the lights went out, one by one, as the butler made his final rounds, locking windows and bolting doors. The Villa Trounex slept under the moon, slept, that is, except for three tired Italian boys who were washing up glasses in a basement kitchen, and Paul Hampton, who was packing monogrammed silk shirts in a small leather suitcase in his bedroom.
CHAPTER THREE
THE TELEPHONE BY HENRY’S BED rang insistently. Cursing it, he rolled over and stretched out a hand automatically. He had been in so deep a sleep that he had already picked up the telephone before his mind had fully registered the fact that he was in a hotel bedroom in Geneva and not in his own London flat. Consequently, it was with a sense of shock that he heard the bright, polite, female voice saying, “Monsieur Tibbett? Bon jour, monsieur. C’est sept heures et demi. Vous voulez du thé...du café...?”
“Deux cafés complets, s’il vous plaît,” he muttered. “Merci, mademoiselle.”
“Service!”
That word brought him back abruptly to Geneva. As a reply to “thank you,” the French as a rule say “C’est moi qui vous remercie,” although their current passion for truncated expressions often turns it into a mere “C’est moi,” but the Genevese, without exception, say “Service!” with a particular, pert, uprising intonation which is unmistakable. This is better than the English, however, who say nothing at all.
Henry lay on his back and contemplated the ceiling with some gloom. Memories came flooding back, most of them unpleasant. The opening session of the subcommittee today. The leakage of information. Bill Parkington’s insinuations about John Trapp, and his own reluctant promise to “see what he could do.” What, for heaven’s sake, could he do? Approach John as one Englishman to another? “I say, old man, we rather think you may be in the pay of a gang of dope runners. Do tell us about it, there’s a good chap. Don’t want any unpleasantness, you know.” Henry smiled to himself wryly. There was, of course, another classic line of attack. “Trapp, I know your secret.” To which, he reflected, John might well reply, “Which one?”
Henry lit a cigarette, and blew a thin column of smoke toward the ceiling. Beside him, Emmy stirred. She made a little moaning noise, yawned and rolled over.
“Gosh,” she said indistinctly, “is it morning already? What a gorgeous party that was. I feel awful.”
“You shouldn’t have drunk so much champagne.”
“I know. Never mind, it was worth it. Have you ordered coffee?”
“I have.”
“You’re an angel and I adore you,” said Emmy. She sat up, kissed Henry, and then collapsed onto the pillow again. “I could sleep forever.”
“There’s no earthly reason why you shouldn’t, at least till midday,” said Henry. “I’ve got to be bright and early, worse luck. I promised our verbatim reporter I’d be in at half past nine sharp to go over the transcript of the speech I made yesterday, and then there are changes in the agenda for today...”
Emmy giggled. “I can’t imagine you making speeches.”
“I’m very glad you aren’t there to hear them,” said Henry.
“Anyway,” Emmy went on, “I’ve got to get up too, because I’m meeting Gerda at ten and we’re going out to the country to have lunch.”
“Lucky devils. Where?”
“I don’t know exactly. Some little pub in a pretty village just outside the town. Natasha Hampton was telling Gerda all about it last night. She’s got all the details.” There was a discreet knock on the door. “Thank God. Coffee.”
Henry reached the Palais des Nations at a quarter past nine, and by twenty-five past had found his way through a maze of green corridors to the suite of offices set aside for his subcommittee. In view of the “top secret” aspect of the agenda, they had been allotted one of the “closed” suites, consisting of a single passage leading to the conference room, with offices and cloakrooms opening off either side of it. The entrance to this passage was guarded by a large, melancholy gentleman, who wore a heavy mustache and the gray uniform of the Palais staff. He sat like a bored watchdog in his little glass kennel by the door, and admitted only such favored individuals as could produce the requisite pass.
“So if the security leak goes on,” Henry thought, as he fumbled in his wallet for the precious scrap of paper, “it really does mean trouble in the nest. It must be one of us.”
He found his pass. The watchdog scrutinized it sadly, nodded, made a note in a large book, and motioned Henry into the corridor.
To Henry’s surprise, he was by no means the first to arrive, although the meeting was not scheduled to start until ten o’clock. The corridor was already alive with voices, and from the office a typewriter clicked busily. Through the open door of the conference room, at the far end of the passage, Henry could see Helène Brochet talking to Konrad Zwemmer. She looked up, caught sight of Henry, and waved. He returned the salutation, and went into the men’s cloakroom, on the right-hand side of the corridor. Here he met Bill Parkington coming out.
“Hi,” said Bill. “Sleep well?”
“As well as could be expected,” said Henry. Bill grinned encouragingly, and went off down the corridor and into the delegates’ rest room. He was carrying a bulky sheaf of notes, and Henry guessed that he would be wanting to put the finishing touches to the speech he was due to make. Bill hated making speeches, and suffered from severe stage fright until he actually got going, when it was almost impossible to stop him.
In the cloakroom Alfredo Spezzi was combing his hair carefully in front of the mirror. As with many Italians, there was something of the dandy about Alfredo. His shirts were silk and monogrammed, his cuff links gold, and his shoes tapering and made of the finest suede. Indeed, he had always seemed to Henry to exemplify the saying that, whereas a Frenchman will cheerfully go around in rags in order to eat well, an Italian will starve sooner than appear badly dressed. At the moment, Alfredo was studying his handsome face with minute care, as the little tortoise-shell comb flicked through his fair hair.
“Good morning, Alfredo,” said Henry. He took off his light raincoat and hung it up. “Ready for the fray?”
Spezzi smiled at him in the mirror. “I hope we can achieve something,” he said. “This is not like a true investigation. This is talk, talk, talk and more talk—and at the end of it, what? A resolution on a piece of paper.”
“Where would the world be without conferences?” asked Henry philosophically. “At least, neither you nor I would be in Geneva, so let’s be thankful.”
He glanced at his reflection in the mirror, found it depressing, and went out, leaving Alfredo still wrestling with a recalcitrant lock.
At the moment when Henry emerged into the passage, Annette Delacroix came out of the small filing room opposite. She looked very tired, Henry thought, and when she spoke, her voice was sharp and angry.
“Ah, there you are, Henry,” she said. “Have you seen John yet?”
“Not this morning,” said Henry. “Why?”
“He’s apparently expecting you,” said Annette. “He’s in the office, typing away furiously at something, and he’s given orders that he’s not to be disturbed until you arrive, and that he must see you alone.”
“Good heavens,” said Henry. His heart sank. “What’s it about, do you know?”
“I have no idea,” said Annette icily. “I haven’t seen him for several days. I can only tell you what he said this morning. It’s extremely annoying of him. That’s supposed to be my office and my typewriter.”
“Oh, well,” said Henry, “I’d better go and see what he wants. By the way, as soon as you can get in there, I’ve some urgent typing for you to do. There’s a change in this morning�
�s agenda.”
“I’ve got my copy here if you’d like to mark it,” said Annette, holding out the sheet of paper in her hand.
Henry took out his pen, and, holding the paper against the wall, made some rapid corrections, eliminating the more secret items and substituting innocuous ones. He was conscious of a dark sense of foreboding. Since his conversation with Parkington the night before, the pleasant, compact and relaxed atmosphere of this conference had disappeared abruptly, to be replaced by an oppressive feeling of suspicion. Henry was not given to emotional flights of fancy, but it was true that as he stood there in the bleak corridor of the Palais he felt an illogical impression of conspiracy around and against him.
He did not have much time to indulge in this fancy, however, for scarcely had he made the last correction when Mary Benson came out of the interpreters’ room. Mary was a tall, auburn-haired Australian girl—quiet and competent, one of the finest verbatim reporters at the Palais des Nations. Henry had liked her from the beginning, and was delighted that she had been assigned to the subcommittee. Her work was highly professional and carried out with the minimum of fuss. She had a pleasant, low voice with only the faintest tang of an Australian accent to it.
“Ah, Inspector Tibbett,” she said. “I was looking for you. I know you’re very much in demand this morning, but we did have a date, didn’t we?”
“We did,” said Henry. “I’m right with you. Here you are, Annette.”
Annette took the revised agenda without a word and walked off down the corridor and into the rest room. Henry followed Mary Benson into the interpreters’ room.
Death on the Agenda Page 4