Fighters of Fear

by Mike Ashley

  “But I’ve been to see her since then.”

  “It seems she had said she did not wish to admit anyone but Dr. Charlot and Dr. Galtie. Galtie was there to lunch with her when I hired a car and came up to you.”

  “But, Raymond, you, the least suspicious of men! Something more than all this must have happened. What is it?”

  “Don’t think I am giving way to imagination if I tell you. It’s this. I got in to see her this morning, I met Charlot leaving, and he let me up. I had a few words with him, and he was evidently in a bad temper. Then I went on up to see Valerie. She was out of bed, looking ghastly, in a rose-coloured kimono, with her face made up as I have never seen it. You know how, usually, she looks a little, pale, rabbity thing. She was rouged and pencilled and done up to the last degree, and somehow it only made her look more dreadful. Lunch for two was laid on the table, with a bottle of wine and a lot of flowers. And I knew, as surely as though she had told me—which she didn’t—that she was expecting the unspeakable Fulgence to lunch with her. But she was full of hints—it was as though she were so bubbling with something that she couldn’t altogether repress it. She simply showered hints. That there-was nothing to worry over, that she wasn’t really at all ill, that it was all a sort of huge practical joke, and that I was to tell you so—you particularly. You would understand some day, and she knew you wouldn’t be hard on her when you did.

  “Then she began to want to push me off; she kept looking towards the door, and then she let fall that ‘he’ mustn’t find me there. Of course I knew, as you know, there is only one ‘he’ to Madame Sorel, I came away with I don’t know what foreboding. For Solange, the little annoyed doctor I met on the step told me that the fall was mere hysteria, that she hadn’t been hurt, but that she was undoubtedly ill now, and he had warned her he thought it was a slight touch of cholera, which might become serious. There is a lot of cholera in the poorer parts of Nice just now. And she—she obviously had paid no heed to him. She seemed to have an inner knowledge that told her she was not stricken with cholera, something that made her feel perfectly confident, and even amused; and yet—she looked so ill, she obviously felt so ill, that the wonder is she was on her feet. It all seemed so sinister—the table for two, which she had evidently begun to lay as soon as the doctor’s back was turned—for she was still at it when I came in—her gaiety, her queer, concealed joy, and the dreadful physical discomfort she was unmistakably suffering from, and that yet didn’t seem to frighten her.”

  “We must go down at once,” said Solange.

  She threw on a motor-bonnet and veil and a wrap, and in a very few minutes she and Raymond were speeding down the steep mountain road that wound and wound its way down to Nice. Neither she nor he spoke on the whole of that nightmare journey down, except to say a few meaningless little things, that neither paid any attention to, when the strain of the two hours in the swift car became too much to be borne in total silence. Half way down they passed a closed car, similar to Fulgence Galtie’s, on its way up.

  The street was hot and white when they drew up outside the house where Valerie Sorel lodged, and on every glaring house-front the shutters were folded like tired eyelids across the windows; only at the room which was Valerie’s they were flung wide, as though to admit even the hot air of the afternoon as something better than none. And as they waited for a moment, listening for they knew not what, after the engine had been stopped, they heard a faint noise, as of an animal in pain, that rose and fell with a horrible persistency in the still street. Solange rang and rang, and then Raymond smashed the glass panel with a blow of his gloved fist, put in his hand, and unlatched the door, and they entered. They ran up the narrow stairs—though the moans were lower now they held no quality as though the pain were abated, but sounded rather as though the increasing weakness of the sufferer muffled them—and when Solange and Raymond ran into the bedroom, it was a livid face that Valerie Sorel turned on them from the tumbled pillows. She was in bed, with the pretty rose-coloured kimono still about her writhing shoulders, and paste pins flashing in her disordered hair.

  Solange ran towards her and took her hand.

  “Have you sent for your doctor, the one who has been attending you, Valerie?” she asked; and the sick woman, with a twisted smile, gasped out:

  “No, no, there’s no need. He’s already told me it’s a touch of cholera. I shall be all right.”

  “He must come at once,” said Solange. “Raymond—”

  But Valerie raised herself in bed by a supreme effort.

  “Solange! Stop, stop!” she cried. “You’ll spoil everything!”

  “What do you mean? Come, Valerie, you must tell me everything, or I shall send for him at once. What do you mean? What shall I spoil?”

  Valerie, her lips dry with her pain, began to gasp out her story, desperate to keep Solange from doing anything to spoil the splendid scheme; the scheme that Fulgence Galtie had concocted, which they had been building up with such care all the past weeks.

  She was poor, deadly poor, Solange knew it, with two children to support; children who had lately shown terrible signs of delicacy. And Galtie had fallen in love with her, but he was a young man with his way to make, and it was not possible for him to take on the burden of a wife and two growing children, that was obvious, was it not? So they had devised—or, rather, Fulgence had devised, for he was so clever—a plan by which they could make a good enough income on which to marry. It was perhaps not quite honest, but it only meant cheating an insurance company, and that wasn’t like cheating a person, was it? Insurance companies had no feelings, after all.

  “Yes? Tell me, what was it, this scheme?” asked Solange.

  Well, it appeared the plan was to insure Valerie’s life for a large sum—a very large sum—two and a half hundred thousand francs—ten thousand pounds. It had startled her when Fulgence had first suggested it; it had seemed to bring death so close to her, who was just beginning to feel young for the first time, but he soon explained what he meant.

  She was in perfect health, and the insurance companies would certainly accept her, and he would pay the premiums, which would amount to about four hundred pounds a year. It could be told the insurance people that her idea was to provide for the children, of whom she could say he was the father. For even at this slur on her whole past life Valerie, in her infatuation, had not hesitated. And then she could pretend to have an illness, an accident, and the insurance companies, alarmed, would compound with her to pay her an annuity in lieu of paying a huge sum to the children in case of her death.

  It would probably be quite a comfortable little annuity, not less than two or three thousand francs, and then she could gradually get better and enjoy it for the rest of her life.

  As to the illness, that would have to be real to impress the doctor she called in, and she would have to set her teeth and put up with a good deal of pain and discomfort, and feel as though she were dying, or wanted to, for several days; but after that she and he could be happy for the rest of their lives. He would give her a medicine containing a drug that produced the illness in her, and, though she would suffer, she would not for a single moment be in any danger.

  “And we have done it all beautifully!” gasped Valerie. “The doctor is sure it is cholera, and the insurance people are to be told tomorrow. But you mustn’t send for him now because he has already seen me today, and is satisfied what is the matter, and now that I am feeling so much worse, as Fulgence said I should be bound to, he might guess. Doctors are so clever. But by tomorrow I shall be feeling all right, only very weak, and then everything will be arranged. It is six months since we fixed it up and paid the first premiums, and they will suspect nothing. I shall get my annuity, recover, and Fulgence and I will be able to get married, and the children will grow strong and well with proper food.”

  Valerie fell back on her pillows, exhausted, and Solange whispered to Raymond to fetch Dr. Charlot; but by the time he arrived, fussy, out of temper at what he considered
the vagaries of a capricious woman—he had never forgiven her for having poured away his medicine—Valerie Sorel was unconscious, and in a few more hours she was dead.

  Solange had a fight with Raymond to get him to allow her to return to the sanatorium that night. He was fearful that Galtie, prompted by his knowledge of guilt, would guess where she had gone, and that her life might not be safe. But, as Solange pointed out, it was the only possible course of action. Proof had to be found against Galtie, and at once, for it was this night that he would try to destroy all the proof possible. At last he consented to her returning on one condition, that, while pretending to leave her there, he kept the car at the bend in the road, and himself stayed within call just outside the house.

  They parted at the front door, talking cheerfully in loud voices, and Galtie stood at the top of the steps to greet her with a few scolding words for her wrong behaviour in going motoring without the permission of her doctor. She confessed to an afternoon spent in the rooms at the Casino at Monte Carlo, and waved a laughing farewell to Raymond as the car slid down the drive.

  Then, at nearly midnight, standing there in the dimly lit hall with the pale-faced, smiling doctor, Solange felt her nerve slipping for the first time in her life. She felt utterly helpless, utterly alone, and Raymond, stationed outside the sanatorium, seemed immensely far away. She was suddenly aware of acute and immediate danger.

  She smiled at the doctor, and made as though to go to her own room. For one second it seemed as though he would bar the way, then he fell back and let her pass. She did not undress, merely taking off her motor-bonnet, slipping a dressing-gown over her frock, and letting down her hair, so that she should look as though preparing for bed if surprised.

  She waited half an hour in her room before she very gently opened her door, having turned out her light. In the long corridor all was still, and the one electric light bulb only served to intensify its dimness. Nevertheless, Solange softly turned off the switch as she passed it on her way to the room where Dr. Galtie often sat up half the night working.

  What she hoped to find out she could not have told, probably at the back of her mind was the hope of being able to search the room for hidden poisons, not kept tabulated and ranged duly as in his laboratory. She knew that even he would not be sitting up working on the night after Valerie Sorel had died at his hands; even for his iron nerves there must be reaction.

  To get to the workroom she had to pass the bedroom where the two little Sorels slept, and when she reached their door she paused, thinking of their unconscious slumber and of what they would have to be told on the morrow. In the stillness she heard a faint sound from within—a sound of metal chinking against glass. In an instant fear, a monstrous fear, rushed over her in a wave. It was as though she could feel the very hair on her head prickling with it; the hot blood rushed to her face and ebbed away, and she stood trembling in the knowledge that something terrible was going forward behind that closed door.

  She fled on noiseless feet down the corridor. Next door to the room of the Sorels was an empty room. She went in, passed through to the long window, opened it, and went swiftly up the balcony to their window. Contrary to all rules of the establishment, it was closed.

  Solange always thought afterwards that that was the most horrible moment of her life, while she hesitated whether to creep away and find Raymond or boldly to break the glass and startle the criminal within. If she decided on the former course, she might be too late, if on the latter, she might only precipitate a catastrophe without power to prevent it.

  A little cry, a child’s cry, decided her. Wrapping the folds of her dressing-gown round her hand, she drove in the pane with one blow, and herself followed as she burst the leaves of the window apart.

  Fernande Sorel lay in bed, sleeping heavily, her usually pale little face flushed a dark red, while Ninette, drowsy but conscious enough to mirror acute fear in her half-shut eyes, was lying propped up by pillows in a chair, her bare arm, pathetically thin, stretched across Galtie’s knees. He held it firmly in one hand, while his other still held poised, as he sat stricken with alarm, a hypodermic syringe.

  What happened after was a swift but violent nightmare. He closed with Solange as she began to call for help at the top of her power, and they were still struggling backwards and forwards, she rapidly getting the worst of it, when Raymond burst into the room. Even then, such was the fury with which Galtie fought, he might have got away, had not the noise aroused a male patient, who came rushing in, and luckily, seeing a woman attacked, sided against his doctor with true French gallantry. The patient was glad enough himself in the days that followed, when little by little Galtie’s plans were unfolded by the merciless inquisition of French justice, which is so much harder on the guilty and so much kinder to the community than is the British.

  That Galtie had caused the infatuated Valerie to poison herself by taking his medicine in her blind trust was soon evident. Enormous quantities of digitaline were found in her body, and the evidence of Solange and Raymond would have been enough without the large sums of the insurances, which, though not made out as payable to Galtie, she had left to him in her will as the guardian of her children. Those children, so that they should not long incommode him, he had drugged with veronal, preparatory to inoculating them with typhoid germs, which was what he had been about to do when Solange stopped him. The broken bacilli tube was found beside the charged syringe.

  But Galtie was a great murderer; he was of the true breed of born killers. One little dressmaker and her children were a mere morsel by the way for him. The trays for the early morning tea of the patients were always set over-night with biscuits and milk, so that only the tea had to be added to them next day, and in the milk on Solange’s tray there was digitaline. If Raymond had not been so prompt in answer to her frantic cries, he probably would never have found her alive. The born killer was uppermost in Galtie when he was pinioned—the thwarted killer, who is the most dangerous of all the phenomena of human society. He had already prepared her death, ready to be taken to her by an unsuspecting maid, and caught at his work on the children he would not have hesitated, in his blind rage, at putting that death forward, whatever the consequences to himself.

  He managed to open a vein in prison, and so cheated the guillotine, but of all his intended victims at the sanatorium—and there was a rich spinster, who had nearly decided to make her will in his favour, a spinster who seemed to have grown worse rather than better—all recovered and survived him. The little Sorels got over their delicacy with proper treatment, and it was their mother only who paid for Galtie’s greed with her life.

  Yet, on looking at the whole affair, Solange could not be sorry she had acted as she had. If she had stayed in Nice she might have saved the life of the mother, but the more valuable lives of the children would have been sacrificed. Her regrets in the whole ghastly affair were for herself—for the self that had been killed, as surely as her physical self would have been killed had she taken Galtie’s poison, by that night of horror.

  For she saw, with that clarity of hers, that there was no evading even by herself that her growing sentiment for Raymond had indeed clouded both her vision and her judgment, that it had caused her to lie steeped in langour at the critical time, so that it was thanks to him and not to her that she had been able to save the children’s lives and bring Galtie to book. Her instinct, that had never failed her in the smallest way before, had only worked partially in the case of Fulgence Galtie. It had warned her along every nerve when she first met him, but it had not kept up the warnings since, or never could she have lain day after day at the sanatorium and dreamt of her own affairs till she had almost grown to wonder if her feeling against Galtie were not imagination after all.

  She had seen him day after day with the rich spinster, and detected nothing sinister in his attitude towards her—and she had never failed in so clear a case before. She had not even been sure in which direction the danger most clearly threatened. She had hesitated
between Valerie and the children, the children and Valerie. That she had been enabled at the end to do the most useful thing did not make the matter any better. The fact remained that even the approach of personal emotion had tarnished the fine surface of her gift, which was put out of order by it as a compass is deflected from the truth by the presence of magnetic iron.

  She had to choose whether her work or Raymond meant most to her, and the trouble was that that meant—did herself or humanity mean most?

  It was not for several months that she could be strong enough to be glad that she had chosen her work. Raymond, she knew only too surely, would “get over it,” for by temperament he was younger far than she, though their years were the same, and he would come to be glad of her as a friend, while probably showing her with pride the photograph of some fluffy-haired little girl from America who was the “one girl in the world.” But for her, slight as some people might have thought it, it was her only love affair, because he was the only man for whom she had felt that tentative and delicious softening.

  Her first real consolation came about six months after the affaire Galtie, in a manner which her sense of humour could not but appreciate. She sat next to a murderer in a train, felt the old spiritual distress, and was proved right by his subsequent trial.

  It was not without humour that it should be a murderer who consoled her for the loss of Raymond, but she knew that there was more to it than that. She had lost Raymond and personal joy, but she had also lost bondage and the failure of her powers. She had found not only the ability to work again, but also the freedom which is only attained when no other human being can enslave the imagination, though the whole world can delight it without harm.

  NORTON VYSE IN

  THE VILLA ON THE BORDERIVE ROAD

  ROSE CHAMPION DE CRESPIGNY

  Rose Champion de Crespigny (1859–1935), wife of Philip Augustus Champion de Crespigny, whose brother, Claude, was the 4th Baronet, hardly sounds like someone who might churn out historical romances, detective stories, and the occasional supernatural story. Born Annie Rose Key, daughter of Sir Astley Cooper Key, Admiral and First Sea Lord, she had married at the tender age of eighteen and bore her husband four children, two of whom became future baronets before the line died out. But her husband, who was himself a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, died in 1912, and thereafter she turned increasingly to spiritualism. She had been writing stories and poems since the mid-1890s, moving to fiction after several years researching the Huguenots in England, the Highland clans, and the folklore of the New Forest. She was also a passable artist, especially of ships and seascapes. Her first book, From Behind the Arras, appeared in 1901. She was not a prolific writer but produced regular competent material as the muse dictated. Her growing interest in spiritualism turned her more toward the occult and the series about Norton Vyse. It ran in The Premier Magazine during 1919. Vyse is portrayed as a psychic and clairvoyant with an ability as a psychometrist, not unlike Moris Klaw. He is portrayed as being calm, able to induce peace, but at the same time his eyes have a “hint of hidden things carefully guarded.” Again, we have that suggestion that the occult detective knows far more than he ever reveals. Mrs. Champion de Crespigny had planned a second series of Vyse stories but it never materialized and the stories remained uncollected until the publication of Norton Vyse: Psychic in 1999. In her later years Mrs. Champion de Crespigny was actively involved in psychic research and was vice-chairman of the British College of Psychic Science. At her funeral, after her sudden death from pneumonia in February 1935, there was a huge crowd, not only of representatives of society, but also among spiritualists.