In Spite of Thunder

by John Dickson Carr

“No, no, no! Don’t be cross; oh, please don’t be cross! If you desert me …”

  “Nobody’s deserting you. You’ve got a perfectly good boy-friend to depend on. Or you should have.”

  “He’s gone to work. He works at Dufresne’s Bank in Geneva. And there’s nobody else here.”

  “Nobody else? At eight o’clock in the morning?”

  “I mean there’s nobody I can trust. You’ve got to come out and take me away from here. I did something foolish. I—I didn’t think there was any danger, not really. But she’s out of her mind. She really is out of her mind. Please, please don’t leave me with her!”

  Thunder-clouds were massing up to the east, throwing their shadows. Brian stared at the telephone.

  “Brian! Please! Are you still there?”

  “Hang on,” he said. “I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

  And so, at a quarter to nine, on that lonely ridge where the white-painted house loomed with a bull’s-eye window of multicoloured glass, he took a few steps back to study its façade. But this told nothing. There were flowers in window-boxes. There was a strip of brick terrace in front of the open door. Otherwise …

  “Hullo, there!”

  Brian entered the hall.

  A certain casual untidiness, despite the breath of polished floors and fresh curtains, lay all about him. A room to the left, a room to the right, opened under broad arches from the central hall with a staircase on the left-hand wall. As though for a deliberate touch of naïveté in the decoration, there was a brightly coloured wall-clock whose pendulum had the figure of a doll-girl in a swing.

  The clock ticked loudly. The doll-figure, beaming over one shoulder, switched back and forth. And a voice said: “Yes?”

  At the back of the hall a door in the polished panelling, evidently leading to a cross-passage through the width of the villa, had opened with some abruptness. The woman who hurried out was middle-aged and harassed-looking; she appeared to be Swiss, though she addressed him in excellent English.

  “Yes? What is it, please?”

  “Good morning.” Brian restrained a jump of his crawling nerves. “I couldn’t seem to—”

  “Alas! It is difficult to hear. My fault. You wished?”

  “Miss Audrey Page. Where is she?”

  “Miss Page is not with us.”

  Tick-tick went the clock, the little Swiss girl-figure making two arcs of her swing before Brian realized he might be reading a wrong and sinister implication into the words.

  “I am so sorry!” said the middle-aged woman, smiling briefly but with the harassed look still there. “Miss Page, I should say, is out. She has gone for a walk.”

  “A walk? When did she go? How did she seem?”

  “It is perhaps half an hour ago. She was happy. I have heard her singing.”

  Several times more the jovial pendulum swung while Brian tried to control his expression. If that little devil had dragged him out here for a nonsensical reason, for a reason that was a lie, or for no reason at all, this time he was through trying to help.

  Finished! Past it! She must …

  Brian, regaining suavity, caught back his thoughts.

  “I am a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Ferrier,” he said, stretching truth on his own part. The woman gave him something that was between a bow and a curtsey. “But I understood … where is everybody?”

  “Sir, we are disturbed today.”

  “Yes. Where is everybody?”

  “Mrs. Ferrier is occupied. Mr. Ferrier and Miss Catford are not yet up. The gentleman with the title has borrowed the Rolls and driven to Geneva. And the very large and stout gentleman with the stick: ah, yes! I think he is in the cellar.”

  It was unnecessary for the woman, who had started a little, to explain that this last statement had not been a figure of speech. Heavy footfalls could be heard ascending invisible stairs.

  The door at the rear of the hall did in fact lead to a transverse passage with back rooms opening from it. Brian observed this as Dr. Gideon Fell, in a black alpaca suit with a string tie and a smear of cobweb across the collar, loomed up in the passage behind the middle-aged woman.

  Wheezing, less ruddy of face than he had been for several years, Dr. Fell maneuvered himself sideways out into the hall. He was sunk in obscure speculations; he did not even see Brian or anyone else.

  “Bottle!” he said clearly. “Archons of Athens! Bottle!”

  “My name is Stephanie,” the woman cried out, catching a sort of psychic atmosphere. “I will go now.”

  And she hurried back into the passage and closed the door.

  To Dr. Fell, standing in the hall and leaning on his crutch-headed stick, it seemed vaguely to occur that he had heard a noise or that someone had spoken. He rolled up a massive head, under the mop of hair growing ever more grey. Presently recognition dawned in his face.

  “My dear Innes!” he protested, with rumblings of distress and apology. “How do you do? This is an unexpected pleasure at a doubtful time. Er—can I help you in any way?”

  “Possibly. Who was the woman who just left us?”

  “Forgive me; did a woman just leave us? Tut, now! Describe her!” said Dr. Fell, and woke up thoroughly as Brian did so. “Yes, to be sure! That was Stephanie, the servant.”

  “The housekeeper, you mean?”

  “No. I am instructed to say she is ‘the’ servant. The only one. So, so? My statement appears to bother you.”

  Brian looked round him.

  “It does, in a way. Dr. Fell, you’ve seen the cars this household maintains. Is it usual to keep a Rolls and a Bentley, but only one servant to attend to everything?”

  “Sir, I am no authority on domestic arrangements in Switzerland.”

  “Neither am I; but …!”

  “Hear me!” thundered Dr. Fell, with a violence that concealed apprehension. “This is a country of great charm and high civilization. But I am paying my first visit. I believe it has the lowest homicide-rate in the world. And yet one of the most celebrated of all murder-cases, the death of a certain woman, occurred at Geneva in 1898. Aside from this, unfortunately, my knowledge is mostly confined to misapprehensions gained from the music-hall. Not having either a figure for mountain-climbing or a taste for yodelling in the streets, I have hitherto neglected it. For all I know, the servant-problem may be as acute here as it is in Sunningdale or Hackney Wick. Explicit; here endeth.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about the servant problem. Neither were you.”

  There was a silence.

  “Oh, ah!” grunted Dr. Fell, suddenly lowering his defences. “Oh, ah! Well. Yes, it is revealing. Come with me.”

  He led the way into the drawing-room on the right.

  “Last night, in here,” he continued, “the amount of theorizing and loose talk about murder was enough to make my flesh creep. But we were civilized about it. By thunder, how civilized we appeared to be!”

  “Including Audrey Page?”

  “Oh, ah. Especially Audrey Page.”

  Audrey was not quite civilized, Brian had been reflecting. Neither, he suspected, was Eve Ferrier. Then he tried to drive the thought out of his mind.

  Behind this room lay a dining-room where the remnants of several breakfasts still cluttered a table. The drawing-room itself, a comfortable place of overstuffed furniture in white slip-covers, had two high windows facing the front. Two more windows, in the east wall, overlooked a space from which trees had been cleared away to make a formal garden stretching along the side towards a stone wall bordering a ravine at the back.

  And between these two windows, above the stone fireplace, hung a half-length portrait of Desmond Ferrier as Hamlet.

  A little yellow light burned above it, the only light in the room. Its rich oils gleamed like Ferrier’s face. Though the painter’s signature was only a blur, you could see the date of 1926. Below the fireplace, on a table, Sir Gerald Hathaway’s Guy-Fawkes hat lay beside the open brief-case and the photograph album.

  The whol
e room seemed explosive with presences which were not there.

  “Oh, yes!” said Dr. Fell, following Brian’s glance. “If you are thinking of your friend Hathaway …”

  “Where is he?”

  “In Geneva, I presume. He took one of the cars. But last night he was all over me.”

  “What did he say? Did he explain how Hector Matthews could have been poisoned when it wasn’t possible to administer any poison?”

  Dr. Fell reared up, hammering the ferrule of his stick on the floor.

  “Unless we retire to Bedlam, sir, we must accept the word of a reputable German surgeon who swears there was NO drug or poison. We even telephoned to Stuttgart and woke him up.”

  “Very well: put it in any terms you like! Did Hathaway explain how any man can be made to jump off a balcony by witchcraft or black magic?”

  “No, he did not. He merely outlined the factors of the problem; and even then, it seemed to me, he misstated one of them.”

  “You think it couldn’t have been done?”

  “I think so, yes. But I don’t know. Archons of Athens, I don’t know!”

  Here Dr. Fell, with commendable restraint, lifted his stick but prevented himself from taking a swipe at Hathaway’s hat.

  “Let me commend to you,” he added, “the virtue of humility. Up to about two o’clock this morning, at least, I felt convinced of one thing. If any murder-plot were in fact directed against someone in this house, the intended victim could be only one person.”

  “Oh? Which person?”

  “Eve Ferrier, of course!”

  “Why ‘of course?’”

  “I will not bore you,” Dr. Fell said with dignity, “by stating my reasons now. Basically, and perhaps wrongly, I still think them valid.” He looked harassed. “Nevertheless, when Miss Audrey Page was in some fashion persuaded to join us here at past one in the morning, these old snake-locks of mine curled with disquiet. Up to that moment I had not realized that Mrs. Ferrier hated her.”

  Brian stood very still. Outside long windows, over all these craggy hills, he could hear acres of trees seething under the wind.

  “Last night—” he began. “Last night you swore Audrey was in no danger!”

  “I did not swear it. I said it. How are you aware I said it?”

  “Audrey and I overheard you. Never mind that! About an hour ago Audrey rang me up at my flat. …”

  “Oh, ah? Well?”

  “A first I thought it was a game of some kind. Then it scared me. Audrey pleaded to be taken away from here; she said Mrs. Ferrier had gone crazy.”

  Dr. Fell’s expression, his mouth slowly opening under the bandit’s moustache, had begun to change. By this time Brian was almost shouting.

  “But then, when I did get here, it turned out to be a game after all. Or I thought it was. Audrey did go for a walk, didn’t she?”

  “I presume so. That was what Stephanie told me.”

  “Did you see her go?”

  “No, I did not.”

  “Where’s Mrs. Ferrier?”

  Dr. Fell drew a deep breath.

  “Sir, there is no need to alarm yourself! Mrs. Ferrier is in the room they call the study, and most assuredly she is alone. The lady seems obsessed by these memoirs of hers; she declares her ‘new life’ cannot begin until she has finished the book and told all. Let me repeat—” Here Dr. Fell stopped abruptly, as though at a new thought.

  “Where is this study?”

  “Upstairs, at the back of the villa.”

  “Dr. Fell, is there by any chance a balcony?”

  Carefully, with an intense and cross-eyed carefulness, Dr. Fell put down his stick on the table beside the brief-case and the album.

  “Attend to me!” he begged. “If you are thinking that history may repeat itself, put the notion out of your mind. It may be I have a glimmer of what Hathaway is driving at. Even in the unlikely event that he is right, there is no need to fear what happened before.”

  “Is there a balcony?”

  “There is. There are three rooms upstairs at the back of the house, with a balcony running outside all three, and the study in the middle.”

  “Then I think I’d better go up there.”

  “Go up if you like. And I have made a fool of myself many times. But the balcony has no connection with this. The same thought had occurred to me; it must be rejected; it has no validity!”

  “Probably it hasn’t. All the same, I’m going up there.”

  “Oh, Lord! Oh, Bacchus! Oh, my ancient hat! ‘Tell all.’ Mrs. Ferrier hides herself away there; she will allow no one to enter. …”

  Brian did not hear the last of this. He walked with every appearance of casualness into the lower hall, not wishing to make a fool of himself. Then he began to run.

  There were sixteen steps, uncarpeted and painted brown, in the staircase along the left-hand wall. If he went up them two treads at a time, he made as little noise as possible. In the upstairs hall, where three closed doors faced him from a cross-passage through the width of the villa, his footsteps clacked so loudly on hardwood that he stopped.

  It was all so normal-looking!

  A vacuum-cleaner stood beside a linen-cupboard near the head of the stairs. A mop was there too. But it could do no harm if he knocked at the study-door. Brian ran at it, and lifted his hand to knock.

  “You shan’t have him,” said the voice of Eve Ferrier. “Not after all these years. You shan’t have him.”

  It was not loud, beyond that closed door, but it was not normal either.

  “I never looked at him!” That was Audrey’s voice. “I never once thought of him!”

  “Don’t lie to me. It was all in a diary. I saw it yesterday evening. You pretended one thing, and you were doing another.”

  Brian seized the knob and wrenched it. But the door was locked or bolted on the inside. He shouted something, and never remembered what it was, just before he began to hammer his fist on the panel.

  There was no reply. Then footsteps began to retreat, as though towards a window.

  The realm of all nightmare, where dreams hold us helpless, and coalesced like a wall in front of Brian Innes. Twice more he banged his fist on the door, hearing the whispery voices continue inside. Next, looking left and right, he ran towards the door on the right.

  That was unlocked. He flung it open on a bedroom, with two full-length windows opening towards the back on the balcony he sought. Before five strides had carried him to the window nearest the study next door, he saw an open suitcase—only half unpacked, full of women’s clothes—lying on a chair near the foot of the bed.

  But this impression went past on a flash before the wet breeze swirled in his face, and he reached the window. Outside lay the balcony, very broad if not very sturdy, with its hand-rail and lathlike supports painted green. Wooden steps, from an opening in its floor, led down to a narrow terrace; and below that, beyond a stone wall, the ravine tumbled outwards in massed trees.

  Both Eve and Audrey were on that balcony. One of them did not stay there long.

  “Audrey!”

  They did not hear him. Both women had their backs turned to him, outlined against a vast dark sky. It was not as though Eve were attacking Audrey; it was as though Audrey were attacking Eve—if, in fact, any person touched her at all.

  Audrey was the nearer to him, one hand flung up as though for an invocation. Eve, in a yellow house-coat and black slacks, with high heels that gave her grotesque stature, flung herself suddenly against the hand-rail.

  Just as Brian reached Audrey’s side, Eve threw out her arms as though to grasp something in the air. A streak of lightning shot jaggedly down the sky. And, at the same moment, Eve pitched headforemost with her hands at her throat. If she screamed, he did not hear it under the long concussion of the thunder.

  Nor did he hear any noise when her body, falling past the lip of the low stone wall on the terrace underneath, was caught and swallowed by trees some sixty feet below. Only the thunder rolled i
ts echoes above the hills. He and Audrey were alone.

  ACT TWO

  “Any young fool of a player can humbug the town by appearing in tragedy, but comedy’s a serious matter. You’re not ready for comedy yet.”

  —DAVID GARRICK

  VIII

  SOME TWENTY MINUTES later, with the shock still on his wits, Brian left the study.

  He left by the door to the upstairs hall, which had been locked and bolted on the inside. Pain burnt up through his hand when he unlocked it.

  Both his hands and his clothes were torn and dirt-stained from climbing down the side of a gully to see what must be seen there among the trees. Heart and lungs ached from the strain of climbing back. But physical shock counted for very little.

  The lies in the story he now meant to tell—that is, if he could get away with it—had been planned already. At the door he took a last glance behind him.

  “Is there anything contradictory here?” he was thinking desperately. “Anything at all? Anything that might trip me up?”

  No!

  Still the storm would not break. A wink of lightning opened outside the two open windows, beyond a green-glimmering balcony. Thunder shocked and tumbled up and down the sky.

  But nothing in the study, with its apple-green walls and its many books and pictures, had been altered or even touched. On the writing-table, between a glass ashtray and a bowl of roses, the chromium desk-lamp shed down yellow light on that curious pile of manuscript-sheets written in dark blue ink. Eve’s uncapped fountain pen lay beside them.

  A strong draught rushed through the room, belling out white window-curtains, when he opened the door. A few manuscript-sheets fluttered to the carpet. That didn’t matter, he decided. Brian glanced at the mantelpiece, where a clock showed twenty minutes past nine.

  Then he closed the door behind him and went to the head of the stairs.

  “Dr. Fell!” he called clearly. “Dr. Fell!”

  His voice was shaky; he cleared his throat.

  But for a moment only the thunder answered.

  The upstairs hall was almost dark. From what he had been told, from what he now knew, he could understand the arrangement of rooms on this floor; he could try to remember who slept (or did not sleep) in each one.