In Spite of Thunder

by John Dickson Carr

  “Events, in the first months of this year, began to march towards a predestined end. But here I am indulging in a deplorable practice of anticipating the evidence. Let us forget this. Let us consider the situation only as it presented itself to me when Ferrier came to me in London, and I arrived here to learn what I could learn.

  “Mrs. Ferrier was talking ecstatically of a ‘new life.’ She had decided, or someone had persuaded her, on a triumphant return to the stage. She had decided, or someone had persuaded her, that first she must celebrate this by writing her memoirs: working always in a room, the study, which nobody else used. Meanwhile someone had been whispering rumours about her, rumours about the alleged poisoning of Hector Matthews. She had decided, or someone had persuaded her, to demonstrate her lily-serene innocence by summoning an assorted little group to the Villa Rosalind.

  “Wow! I repeat: wow!

  “It was not reasonable to suppose she had been whispering rumours about herself, nor did any of her acts look like a prelude to murdering somebody. If any dirty work had been planned in that household, Mrs. Ferrier would appear to figure not as a possible murderess but as the probable victim.

  “By the same token, at first glance, the potential murderer would have seemed to be Desmond Ferrier himself. He had been throwing out hints about poison. And yet, in my dunderheaded fashion, I could not accept this either.

  “Even apart from the fact that I knew him as essentially an honest and easy-going human being, often weak as we all are weak, he could not be opening a new life for Eve. Despite her words, the evidence showed she really cared as little for him as he cared for her. He would never have suggested a return to the stage, nor would she have behaved so joyously if he had. Furthermore, if he talks too much about poison and his wife dies of it, suspicion will rebound heavily on him. That’s not the plan of a murderer. It looks rather as though his talk were a warning to somebody other than Mrs. Ferrier. ‘Don’t do this; keep off; change your mind; don’t be a fool!’

  “If I eliminated both those two as potential murderers, only one other person (in the household, at least) was left. Still bearing in mind that this was only a possibility, I watched the events of Thursday afternoon and Thursday night.

  “Upstairs, at the villa, Mrs. Ferrier discovered something which upset her universe and sent her straight to the Hotel du Rhône. Since she knew her husband’s reputation, would she have been so shocked to hear of any affair with another woman?

  “Well, you know what happened at the hotel. Somebody had slipped into her handbag a bottle of the perfume she always wore. She would not discover anything wrong until she found the bottle, and held it up, and discovered its contents were the wrong colour. It was at least possible she would make this discovery in public. But why sulphuric acid? And where had it come from? And, above all, why a perfume-bottle?

  “Desmond Ferrier, who had left me at a night-club off the Place Neuve, hurried back there to give me the news. In doing so, upset, he revealed his state of mind at every word. The name of Audrey Page was commented on with a vengeance. He was worried about his son, as he showed. But he now pretended to think Miss Page was in danger: which in a sense she was, but not from a poisoning-attempt by Eve Ferrier.

  “I let him know the direction of my suspicions, and told him plainly I believed it was his wife who might be in danger. He didn’t like this, as two of you saw. Having got as far as that, I now proceeded to make one of the great blunders of my life.”

  Hathaway, not without satisfaction, drew the air through a hollow tooth.

  “Yes,” he said. “I am unrepentant enough to think you did.”

  “How?” Brian asked.

  Hathaway simmered, but decided against calling anyone a fool or an idiot.

  “Years ago at the Murder Club, as I have kept repeating,” he announced, “I outlined the Berchtesgaden case. I gave broad indications that Matthews might have been killed with a poisoned bouquet of flowers.”

  “But Matthews wasn’t poisoned! It was an accident. You yourself couldn’t prove anything, because nobody said a word about any flowers at Berchtesgaden, and nobody said a word about the roses in the study at the villa until we actually saw them there!”

  Dr. Fell quieted an incipient uproar.

  “The possibility,” he said, “should have been considered. If Philip Ferrier did plan any attempt on the life of Mrs. Ferrier, I was expecting something crude—as crude as the sulphuric acid—against which I could guard.

  “The sulphuric acid, true, was meant as a threat and a warning. But its real purpose was to call attention to the perfume-bottle. When the lady was found dead, we were meant to think immediately of roses and rose-perfume. The notion did cross my mind, but I rejected it. Since Matthews had not been poisoned, I firmly rejected the vision of poisoned flowers.

  “Do you remember? On Friday morning you drove out to the villa in a panic. I told you you need fear nothing. I said I had a glimmering of what Hathaway suspected; but, since I could see no evidence of it, I all but jeered at the idea.

  “And then?

  “Mrs. Ferrier pitched off the balcony. Audrey Page had walked by accident into the middle of it; she would surely be involved, as I agreed, unless we told a story to protect her. We went along the balcony. One look into that study told me that a bowl of roses stood beside the place where Mrs. Ferrier had been sitting. Every bit of evidence—Hathaway has since outlined it—showed poisoning had been done with flowers. And so, in protecting Miss Page, we had to take a different line.”

  Here, as though remarking on the devilishness of all human circumstances, it was Audrey he addressed.

  “You follow that, don’t you? Innes wanted to deny you were with Mrs. Ferrier when she fell to her death. He wanted to say you were far away. If they suspected you of throwing her from that balcony, it would have been an admirable idea. On the other hand, since a poison-trap had been set, such a course might have been fatal.

  “If you and Desmond Ferrier were suspected of setting the poison-trap, you yourself wouldn’t have been there to watch it work. You would have been far away. Hence I could not let Innes give such testimony, or let you give it either.

  “My best plan was to insist on the truth; the presence of poison—to be exact, nitrobenzene—should be discovered within twenty-four hours. One question, incidentally: when Mrs. Ferrier was raving at you, did it occur to you she might not have been talking about her husband at all?”

  Audrey shivered.

  “It occurred to me afterwards,” she said, “and I told Brian it did. But at the time: no! We were talking at cross-purposes. She was talking about Philip, and I thought she meant her husband; I said I’d never even looked at him. But she never mentioned the man’s name.”

  “Did you suspect afterwards it might have been Philip?”

  “No! Not even when I knew it must have been somebody else, and tried to get information from Mr. Ferrier at the Cave of the Witches. But before then …”

  “Before then,” grunted Dr. Fell, “we may say mildly that cross-purposes had involved everybody in a muddle I despaired of setting right.

  “This was inevitable. Each person, from the beginning, behaved in accordance with his or her particular temperament; and there are some tolerably flighty temperaments among the lot of you. It would be unjust to say Eve Ferrier had a pathological passion for men, as Innes has told me somebody did say; it would be unjust to call Philip Ferrier a willing murderer. Both these two were too innately respectable to the verge of stuffed-shirtdom: too conscious of the world’s opinion.

  “Mrs. Ferrier did have a passion for men younger than herself. She tried to conquer this years ago: first by becoming engaged to a man much older than herself (Hector Matthews), and later by marrying one (Desmond Ferrier). If the one had money, and the other a famous name, that was sound practicality. But it wouldn’t have worked with the one; it did not work with the other.

  “Philip Ferrier would have protested, and still protests with tears in
his eyes, he never wanted to kill the old girl. But his own practicality wouldn’t endure the situation; his life, his future, his sleep were all threatened; he feared her too much; she should not live, and he got his opportunity.

  “In London, last winter, Mrs. Ferrier bought a book called Poisons and Poisoners. Aubertin and I found this book in the study on Friday afternoon; it helped me in persuading Aubertin. Hathaway found it later. As you said, Sir Gerald, it provided a blueprint for murder.

  “Eve Ferrier saw, with genuine horror, how she could have killed Matthews at Berchtesgaden. She had done nothing of the kind; men of Matthews’s age are susceptible to high altitudes as well as high passions. But she could have done this, since the German police-surgeon had mentioned poison at the time. It made her frantic to prove she hadn’t. Especially since Philip, inspired by the same book, had been circulating rumours—and meant to use the device—against her.”

  Hathaway, glowering, called for attention with a rap on the table like an insistent ghost.

  “You tell us,” he inquired, “she herself could have been caught and killed by a device she was aware of?”

  “Of course. See Dr. Boutet’s medical evidence.”

  “In what way?”

  “The victim, we learn, is overcome by a poison that destroys the judgment like alcoholic intoxication. The damage is done before the victim understands. Surely, Sir Gerald, considering the thumping lie you told on Friday evening, you can accept this?”

  Audrey, who stood in some awe of Hathaway, regarded him with astonishment.

  “Sir Gerald wasn’t telling the truth either?”

  “With dire results as regards my sanity,” retorted Dr. Fell, “nobody was telling the truth. Including your obedient servant. On Friday night, wishing to question you, Aubertin and I called at Innes’s block of flats in the Quai Turrettini; Sir Gerald and Philip Ferrier were with us. (Remember that; it becomes important later.)”

  “But what …?”

  “By this time Sir Gerald, from the conversation of Aubertin and myself, was utterly convinced the person who used the poison was Mrs. Ferrier herself. He did not know how the lady had been caught in her own trap. He only knew the poison had been added to roses from the garden. So he tried to strengthen his case by swearing Mrs. Ferrier had gone into the garden before breakfast.

  “She hadn’t. Other witnesses, including myself, could testify she hadn’t. He was trying to make his case too good; and it nearly landed him in trouble. Later, with a whoop and shout, he pried certain admissions from Paula Catford, and pitched on Miss Catford as the guilty person. If he agrees with Emerson that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds, he could not have shown it better.”

  “I believed—” Hathaway began with some passion.

  “You believed it was for the best? Oh, ah. So did everybody else. Actually, nobody went into the garden on Friday morning. The bowl of roses had been in the study from the previous day. Philip Ferrier, the last person who came downstairs to breakfast, added poison before he joined us at the breakfast table.”

  Here Dr. Fell, trying without success to light his pipe again, made fussed gestures.

  “Tut! Aroint ye, now! Once more I anticipate events. Let us return to Friday morning just following the discovery of the murder, when I questioned Desmond Ferrier in the drawing-room at the Villa Rosalind. This was in the presence of Paula Catford and Brian Innes, before the arrival of the police.

  “Never have I had such little success. All I discovered was the answer to a question no longer of any importance: that is, where had the murderer got the sulphuric acid?

  “Paradoxically, as Dr. Boutet wrote, to buy nitrobenzene is fairly simple. Under its various names as essence of mirbane or benzeldahyde or artificial oil of bitter almonds, it has many commercial uses. But we may not, without provoking some curiosity, stride into a chemist’s and demand sixpennyworth of oil of vitriol. Indeed, I had been wandering about the villa looking for some bottle or container which might have held the stuff: until, in the drawing-room, I recalled Innes’s remark. …”

  “My remark?” interposed Brian. “About what?”

  “About the motor-cars,” answered Dr. Fell.

  “You mean Philip got it—?”

  “He got it out of the battery of a carefully preserved old-time motor-car from the nineteen-twenties: a car, by the way, which only Philip used. The sulphuric acid in modern batteries is better protected. However, when I owned one such car in the dimmer days of my slimness, I can recall tipping over the battery by accident and seeing sulphuric acid run out of it like beer out of a bottle.

  “But what good was this information? None!

  “In the drawing-room, then, I tried to make Desmond Ferrier speak out and tell what he knew. I let him see how much I knew. Because of some remarks made by Paula Catford, he saw his own awkward position (and Audrey Page’s) with most uncomfortable clearness.

  “And yet he refused to speak out.”

  Dr. Fell heaved a gusty sigh.

  “I could scarcely have expected him to denounce his own son, you inquire? Well, but there was even more in it than this. Temperament had begun to dance again. He has found (I hope and I also believe), he has found his own great love in Paula Catford. Too much frankness on his part might have thrown suspicion on Miss Catford—as, later, Sir Gerald did throw suspicion on her. Nor could he resist playing the noble role of the hero wrongly accused.

  “Paula Catford knew he had not been in the Cave of the Witches the night before, as he swore he had. She knew he had been with her in her hotel-room between shortly past seven and shortly past ten. She begged him to stop acting.

  “And still he refused.

  “By thunder, that did it! There was no choice but to throw in my lot with the police.

  “I could still protect Audrey Page, who had been innocently embroiled. But I could no longer protect Desmond Ferrier. Even I, notorious for circumventing and flum-diddling the law when my personal feelings are involved—as Ferrier well knew, when he hurried to consult me at the beginning—could not be expected to shield Philip. Certainly I could not risk another tragedy.”

  “That’s not the first time you’ve mentioned another tragedy,” Brian said. “What other tragedy? And to whom?”

  “Either to you,” replied Dr. Fell, “or to Audrey Page. In actual fact, you escaped it only by one whistle and the grace of God.”

  Heavily apologetic, the man who could tolerate all things and never preached sermons, Gideon Fell nevertheless shook his head when he blinked at Audrey.

  “Come!” he urged. “The possibility of another move on the murderer’s part had existed since Thursday night. After promising Innes you would never go near the Villa Rosalind, young lady, you allowed yourself to be taken there in the hope Innes would follow you. To anyone who saw you on that Thursday night it was plain you cared not one scrap either for Philip Ferrier or for Philip’s father. It was Innes you cared for, I think?”

  “Well, I don’t deny it,” declared Audrey, meeting his eyes. “He—he wants me to marry him.”

  “My dear young lady, there is no need to apologize. But I saw this at the Villa Rosalind on Thursday night. Paula Catford saw it, and commented on it next day. The question was: had Philip seen it? If so, there might be all kinds of trouble.”

  “Had Philip seen it?”

  “Harrumph. Well. Whether he saw it or not, he had very good reason to know it on Friday night. Oh, Bacchus, he had!”

  “How? And, if you’ll please tell me, how much did Paula Catford know or guess?”

  Dr. Fell looked down over his several chins and sighed again.

  “In answering both those questions at once, we can wind up the whole case.”

  For a few seconds he concentrated, gathering together the filaments of his scatterbrain.

  “From what Innes told me yesterday, Sunday,” he continued, “Paula Catford’s behaviour may be indicated without difficulty. She was upstairs at the villa on Frid
ay morning, listening outside Sir Gerald Hathaway’s bedroom, when Innes and I were discussing the best way of shielding you. She could not really believe you and Desmond Ferrier were engaged in a hectic love-affair; she knew too well she was the favoured one. On the other hand, such knowledge has never entirely convinced any woman when doubts worm in.

  “Following this, during the celebrated interview in the drawing-room, Ferrier built up such a case against himself and you—both as lovers and murderers—that her wonder increased. Finally, that night, you ’phoned Desmond Ferrier at the Villa Rosalind; and Miss Catford picked up an extension-receiver to listen. Immediately afterwards Ferrier left the house.

  “She knew you two were meeting, but she had no idea where it would be. So she begged permission to accompany Aubertin and myself (together with Philip Ferrier) when we drove to Geneva for the purpose of questioning first Hathaway and then you. Since she could guess where you were hiding out, as she informed Innes, she nipped ahead of us to Innes’s flat and discovered there would be a meeting at the Cave of the Witches.

  “Mark one thing! In her heart, or so I firmly believe, Paula Catford could still not credit either an intrigue or a murder planned between you and Desmond Ferrier. No: as I have learned since then, she overheard Aubertin and your obedient servant putting their heads together at the villa. Either from something Ferrier had let slip, or from what she could deduce by her own nimble wits, Miss Catford had begun to suspect Philip.

  “She couldn’t reveal that, of course; she was too loyal to Desmond Ferrier. It was simply that she wondered about you and Ferrier; she had to have her doubts settled. And this could be done, she felt, if Ferrier openly admitted his love for her by saying frankly he had been with her on Thursday evening. That, and that alone, must have been her purpose in going with Innes to the Cave of the Witches.”

  Now it was Brian who sat up, shushing Audrey’s questions and drawing Dr. Fell’s attention.

  “Just a minute! You and Aubertin had put your heads together as soon as that? You had decided …?”

  “We had decided on the murderer; we had decided on the method. All I did, in the way of making myself suspect, was to provide Miss Page with an alibi for the crucial time before breakfast when the flowers were poisoned. Aubertin overlooked that.”