Momentarily he was blinded by a second spotlight wheeling into his eyes from the gold and crimson stage. He stood there, shielding his eyes, amid a haze of cosmetic-dust and tobacco-smoke. With several conflicting feelings he watched Audrey at her ring-side table.
There could be no doubt she was enjoying herself hugely.
Though perhaps a little nervous in addition to being rapt and gleeful, she bent forward as the dancers stamped back for their final gyrations. Brian stared at her. Circling round the edge, he stopped at the table, moved in front of it, and towered above her.
“Oh!” said Audrey, almost as though she had seen a ghost.
“Good evening again,” said Brian, and sat down in the chair opposite.
“Really! What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you.”
“How on earth did you find us?”
“Philip said you were having dinner at the Richemond, and then going on to a night-club. There aren’t all that many places to choose from.”
“I mean,” and two spots of colour burned in Audrey’s cheeks, “what are you doing here? What do you want with me?”
“I’m here to tell you something.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. You are not going to visit Eve Ferrier, either now or at any other time. Tomorrow morning I am putting you on a plane for London.”
“Now, really!” said Audrey. Her mouth fell open. “And what if I won’t do it, Mr. Brian Innes? What if I don’t choose to obey you? What will you do then?”
In the background, where the Apache groped towards his fellow-dancer, the tall blonde caught him a ringing wallop across the face and sent him sprawling as the music soared to its end. Brian pointed.
“That,” he answered. “Which is a great deal less than you deserve.”
The dancers, panting, bowed at the end of their number. A torrent of applause burst over the tables, drowning out what Audrey might have been saying. But she said nothing; she sat bolt upright and stared back at him. As the dancers scampered back up on the stage, bowing, the curtains swirled together and hid them. Every light in the room went out to mark the end of the first show. By this time Audrey was speaking, but he couldn’t hear her.
A long drum-roll was followed by the noise of shifting chairs, shifting people, a babble of talk. Ten seconds later the house-lights glowed out softly against a painted ceiling. Audrey had stood up, facing him across a silvered bucket with a champagne-bottle.
“As soon as Phil comes back from answering a ’phone-call,” Audrey cried, “we’re leaving here.”
“You think so?”
“Really, now!—”
“He isn’t coming back”
“I don’t know what you think you’re talking about, but it doesn’t matter in the least. I’ll go alone.”
“Oh, no, you won’t. Sit down.”
Audrey sat down.
“You and I,” Brian went on, taking the champagne-bottle out of its cooler and inspecting it, “are going to get a few things quite clear. Here.” Comparatively little was gone from the bottle; he filled Audrey’s glass.“People in love don’t drink much, do they?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Don’t you know?”
“No, of course I don’t! You—you say Philip’s not coming back? Why ever not?”
“Because I persuaded him not to see you for the moment. I said your future might depend on it. That happens to be true. He’s in love with you.”
“Whereas you’re not, are you?”
“Certainly I’m not. What makes you think I should be fool enough for that?”
“Oh!” said Audrey, and clenched her fists. But she had never been more attractive or desirable than as she said it. “You wouldn’t forbid me to go to Eve’s, would you, when we talked about it earlier tonight? Why are you doing it now?”
“I’ll give you just one of the reasons first.”
“Just one?”
“Yes. Sit still.”
Briefly but vividly, he sketched out the meeting with Hathaway, the meeting with Paula Catford, the aching reasons why a man couldn’t have been poisoned at Berchtesgaden, the entrance of Eve Ferrier, the appearance of a perfume-bottle and a letter from a German surgeon.
“Oil of vitriol?” echoed Audrey. “The stuff they throw in people’s faces?”
“It’s been known to happen.”
“But Mr. Matthews couldn’t have been killed with it, could he?”
“Oh, no. Think of what I’ve been saying.” Brian rapped on the table and spoke in the manner of a stage-direction. “Thunder and lightning. Enter Desmond Ferrier, slightly drunk and full of the devil. When he ripped out that line from Macbeth, the bottle jumped out of his wife’s hand and smashed either by accident or design.”
“By design?”
“Yes. It could have been a stage-effect; Eve herself could have planned it. That’s why I don’t know where to look.”
“Haven’t you got a horrible mind?”
“Possibly. We all have. Now consider the sequel. Nobody else had seen it happen; we bribed the night-porter to hush it up and get rid of the evidence. Mrs. Ferrier used the incident as a reason why Hathaway and Miss Catford should leave the hotel, luggage and all, for her villa. They didn’t seem to be thinking very straight; they agreed. She next suggested we should get you too.”
Audrey, in the act of lifting her glass, set it down that time untasted.
“But Eve Ferrier didn’t know I was in Geneva a day early! Don’t you remember? Phil hadn’t let them know!”
“Well, Mrs. Ferrier knew. She said she’d heard it, and that it didn’t surprise her. Did you tell anyone besides Phil himself?”
“No.”
“Sure of that, Audrey?”
“Of course I’m sure!”
Brian watched her. The big room, after emptying of its first guests, had begun to fill again. Experimental squeals and plunks shook the orchestra-platform as the band tuned up. At the table behind Audrey, alone in vastness, with a fiercely apologetic look on his face and six bottles of beer in front of him, was Dr. Fell. A crutch-headed stick had been propped up against the table; waiters backed slowly away from him.
“Of course I’m sure!” Audrey repeated in a louder voice. “What was Mrs. Ferrier doing at the Hotel du Rhône?”
“Looking for her husband.”
“And Mr. Ferrier?”
“He didn’t say. Anyway!” Brian seemed to dismiss the point. “There were the five of us, in a sort of pandemonium. Mrs. Ferrier, I repeat, immediately wanted to take you with ’em. Since Hathaway was able to say you were putting up at the Metropole, I had to stop that one. I said you and Phil had gone to dinner, but that I hadn’t any idea where you could be found afterwards or what time you would return.”
“Oh?”
“Off they drove, with four or five hundredweight of luggage, in one private car and one taxi. Mrs. Ferrier ’phoned the Metropole at least twice before they left. By this time they’ll have reached home; she’ll be ’phoning the Metropole again.”
“Well, why shouldn’t she?”
The house-lights began slowly to dim. Brian raised his hand to a flying waiter.
“More champagne!” he said in French. “I take it,” he added politely, “you can bear to sit through the show again? Usually there are eight or ten turns, some of them very good.”
“If you think you’re making me do something against my will,” cried Audrey, “then you’d better think again. They are good, yes! Even if they’re not very nice and my father wouldn’t approve. You—you simply don’t expect to find anything like it here. I always associate Geneva with John Calvin and righteousness.”
“This is the French part of Switzerland. People tend to forget that. Look here, Audrey: do you seriously maintain you’re in love with young Philip Ferrier?”
There was a pause. The blue eyes opened wide.
“I most certainly do maintain it,” Audrey exclaimed, with every evidence of
sincerity, “because it’s true. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t be?”
“I can think of a lot of reasons why your conduct is very peculiar if you are.”
“Name one of them, please.”
“With pleasure. When I got back from Paris this evening, I took a taxi straight from the airport to your hotel. I didn’t even stop at my flat on the way.”
“Dear, dear! That was very kind of you, I’m sure. But, as I said at the time …”
“Audrey, do you remember what you did say at the time? Stop and think. I was paying off the taxi when you came charging out of the hotel in a fine old stage of rage and near-panic. Before you realized you’d mistaken me for somebody else, you asked me what on earth I thought I was doing. You said I was too early, and I’d spoil everything.”
“All right! What about it?”
Brian answered her without raising his voice.
“This about it,” he retorted. “Admittedly you were waiting for Philip Ferrier to take you out to dinner. But any woman who’s expecting to be called for, even by her best boy-friend, waits in the foyer until he goes in to collect her. Or else she stays in her room until the reception-desk ’phones to tell her he’s downstairs. She doesn’t do what you did and she doesn’t say what you said.”
“I was only—”
“Shut up.” And he rapped his knuckles on the table. “The implication was that you had mistaken me for Philip, wasn’t it?”
“Of course! That’s what happened.”
“Oh, no. It couldn’t have happened. I’m just over six feet tall, and nobody could possibly call me a heavyweight. Philip is more than half a head shorter, and he’s on the chunky side. All you could see was the outline of a tall, rangy bloke in a Homburg hat, paying off a taxi in a semi-dark street. But it was enough to upset you badly.”
And then, as he studied a face growing ghostlike in the dwindling lights, all Brian’s anger began to change to a deep and desperate concern.
“Didn’t you mistake me for somebody else? Didn’t you mistake me for Desmond Ferrier, turning up at the hotel a good many hours before you expected him? And, if that’s so, can you honestly claim to have any great affection for his son?”
VI
EVERY LIGHT IN the room went out.
The thud of a tom-tom was joined by others, hammering in barbaric rhythm and swelling to a thunder that drowned out his voice. In total darkness he could not even see the white of Audrey’s dress.
The beams of two spotlights, springing up at either side of the waxed floor, converged on the closed curtains of the stage. Of Audrey’s expression, as the diffused glow touched her dark brown hair and set a mask on her face, he could read nothing.
It was perhaps ten seconds later, while tom-toms banged at the nerves, that Audrey began to slap at the table like a woman in a frenzy or a child in a tantrum.
“Oh, God save the lot of us and you most of all! You think I’m having an affair with Mr. Ferrier. Is that it?”
“It doesn’t matter if you are.”
“It does matter! It matters a great deal! Is that what you’ve been thinking?”
“Yes.”
“And you were carrying a suitcase, so you imagined that meant …?”
“We can’t get anywhere if you slide away from every question. Did you expect Desmond Ferrier at the hotel? Was he supposed to be there at some time later tonight?”
“Yes, I did. Yes, he was. But it wasn’t for that reason. If you ever breathe a word to Phil about this, or about my agreeing to meet him at all …!”
“I’m not going to tell anybody. But I’m too fond of you to see you involved in a situation that’s going straight towards another murder with you in the middle of it.”
“Brian, get me out of here. I won’t go back to the hotel, if you’re afraid they’ll ring me up and lure me away; I swear I won’t. Now please, please get me out of here!”
Brian stood up, taking out a note-case. Instantly a waiter appeared at his side and said something he could not catch under the thunder of drums.
The curtains swept apart. Half a dozen remarkably undressed young ladies, three to each side of the stage, coiled down a couple of steps and moved out close past the spectators for what the bills described as a pantomime of the jungle.
“Audrey! Wait!”
But Audrey, who now seemed to hate La Boule Noire as much as she had previously liked it, stopped only when Brian caught her arm. That was the moment when they both saw Desmond Ferrier.
He did not see them, or did not seem to. He had just pushed through the crowd to a table on the opposite edge of the floor, and he was striking a match to light a cigarette.
Evidently he had left his hat at the vestiaire on the way upstairs, as Brian had left a black hat of the same kind. The glow of the match-flame illumined his face: a strong face, with heavy-lidded eyes and hollows under the cheek-bones.
The nose was thin and aquiline, the mouth an elaborately mocking curve. Except for lines of bitterness or discontent stamped into the forehead or round the mouth, which Brian had observed at the Hotel du Rhône, that face showed as comparatively few signs of age as the ruffled dark hair a little shot with grey.
Clear in the match-flame, briefly kindled, Desmond Ferrier’s eyes turned sideways towards a shapely brunette at the head of the dancers.
The tom-toms hammered, the smoky lights shifting colour from white to yellow and then to red. The match was blown out.
“Brian! What’s delaying you?”
“Don’t you see?”
“Yes, of course. Does it matter?”
“I think it might. The last time I saw him, he was driving home with the rest of the party. A few questions might be in order.”
“Brian, no! You wouldn’t dare!”
“Now why the devil wouldn’t I dare? What special and particular privileges has he got?”
Angry voices were crying at them to sit down or get out of the way. Brian looked down at Audrey’s eyes; he realized that he had no idea how much truth she was telling him, or how far he could trust her. When Audrey turned and bolted, through a group which made way for her, he followed her less because of indecision than because of a gesture made by Desmond Ferrier.
Ferrier, much more primed with whisky than he had been an hour or so before, was signalling across the floor. And he was signalling to Dr. Gideon Fell.
Meanwhile, as for Audrey …
To leave that room was a weight off the lungs and brain. Brian picked up his hat at the vestiaire. As he ran downstairs, as the noise receded, he found his wits steadying too. At the foot of the stairs a long and narrow room, set out with chromium chairs and black-topped chromium tables for a lower-floor bar, stretched in brooding half-light to the door giving on the street.
Audrey, flushed but steady of gaze, waited for him by one table with her wrap trailing from her shoulder. There was nobody else in sight.
“All right,” said Brian. Automatically he began to shout; then lowered his voice. “Where do you want to go? My car’s outside, round the corner from the Place Neuve.”
“Your car?”
“Do you still keep forgetting I live here? In a flat not two hundred yards from the Hotel du Rhône? Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t want to go anywhere. But I had to get out of that awful stuffiness before I fainted. Can’t we—can’t we sit down here? Won’t this do?”
Again he conquered an impulse to shout.
“Anywhere will do, Audrey, provided you stop telling a pack of lies and explain why your great friend Desmond Ferrier was going to visit you at the Metropole tonight. Is he still expected there, by the way?”
“Mr. Ferrier is not my great friend. And I haven’t been telling you any real lies at all,” cried Audrey, “even if I didn’t give away everything because I promised I wouldn’t.” A singular luminous fixity glazed over her eyes. “Brian, I do believe …”
“You believe what?”
She darted back past him. He tho
ught she was going under the archway and back up the stairs; instead she sat down in a corner under a half-partition shielding the archway at one side, with a black-topped table in front of her and a sign advertising Cinzano above her head.
“You believe what?” Brian repeated. “And what, exactly, is your notion of telling the truth?”
“Mr. Ferrier wanted to talk to me about Eve! That’s all there was to it.”
“All?”
“All that’s important. I told you at the hotel: my father keeps me under such ridiculous surveillance that sometimes I could scream. So I wanted to have twenty-four hours here on my own. Just to be free, if you can understand that! Or can you?”
“Never mind. What happened?”
“I wasn’t even sure I wanted to see Phil. I did tell Phil in one letter I might be here a day early. I didn’t say I would, I just said I might, and where I was going to stay if I did. And then, when my plane got to the airport in the middle of the afternoon, Mr. Ferrier was there waiting for me.”
“Desmond Ferrier?”
“Yes.” Audrey spoke every word with intense care. “I hadn’t told him I should be there; neither had Phil. But there he was. He said he had something terribly important to discuss with me about Eve. He said he would be occupied, unfortunately, until late in the evening; but people didn’t keep early hours here as they did in London. Couldn’t he, couldn’t he pretty please, drop in and take me out for a drink about midnight?”
“Midnight?”
“Brian, this is the truth!”
“I’m not denying it, am I?”
“Well!” Audrey spread out her hands. “He’s terribly distinguished-looking, and he’s got a way with him, and he rather sweeps you off your feet. I didn’t know what to say, so I said yes.”
“One day, my girl, that may be your epitaph.”
“For heaven’s sake, Brian, will you ever take me seriously? There was no harm in it, was there? Anyway, I had hardly been at the hotel for half an hour when Phil rang up to see if I was there, and asked me out to dinner. I couldn’t refuse Phil, could I?”
“No, you could not,” Brian told her with some restraint. “But you mentioned to him, of course, you were seeing his father later?”
In Spite of Thunder Page 6
