by Jane Arbor
“If she wanted hazards!” echoed Paul in a tone which boded ill for the absent Pierre. Then he had another question for the man.
“How long since this happened?” he asked.
“Not long, Monsieur. Ten minutes, a quarter-hour perhaps.”
“But quite long enough for the young idiot to have broken her neck or wrecked my car, or both!” As Paul put an urgent hand beneath Caroline’s elbow and hustled her away he said over his shoulder, “All right, there’s no question of the car’s being stolen—I know Madame,” and then to Caroline, “Look, we’ve small chance of catching her in that bubble-gum of hers, but we’re going to try, do you mind?”
Half running to keep pace with his stride, Caroline panted, “But how can you start her car? She’ll have taken the ignition key with her. She always does.”
“No matter. There are ways of managing without.”
Evidently there were. For after some manipulations she did not understand the small car’s engine sparked to life, and a few minutes later they were out of the car park and speeding through the town.
“Can you imagine what took Betsy?” Caroline puzzled aloud. “She’s a good driver and knows it. But I don’t think she’s ever handled a car of the power of yours, and actually to ask for a dangerous road—I—”
Staring ahead into the blue dusk, Paul said, “Not so difficult to guess why she did it. As I read it, she probably went to my car, meaning to sit in it to ensure that she saw me again tonight. Then she found the ignition key handy and, being as sore as she was with me, decided to pay me out by driving the car away. Do you remember she once threatened to play hookey with it, and I left her under no illusions as to how I should react if she did?”
“Yes. But you were both joking then. You—you don’t think,” Caroline appealed on a long shuddering breath, “that it could be more than that? I mean, that she wanted a dangerous road because she had got to the point of not caring what happened either to her or to the car?”
“No, I don’t. Steady, Caro!” Paul’s hand went briefly over hers in reassurance. “No, if I know Betsy, she’d wreak a petty vengeance, but she’s not suicidal. She is too sure that life owes her something and that if she nags it enough, she’ll get it. So you’ll find I’m right, I think—she’s going to be satisfied to have thrown you into a flat spin of fear for her and me into the kind of mood I shall certainly be in when we come up with her.”
“Don’t be too angry with her, Paul. I know you didn’t mean to hurt her, but she must have found it pretty hard to take that you should tell her to go back to England to Edward. She accepts it from me. She knows I think she ought to, and in fact I took matters into my own hands this morning. I telephoned her mother in Chicago and asked her if it were possible to pull any strings to get Edward sent home pretty soon,” confessed Caroline,
“You did? With what result?”
“Well, Mrs. Lane couldn’t say. But she promised to let me know if it could be arranged. And when she does, I hope Betsy can be persuaded that we must go home too.”
“We? When Betsy goes, you’ll go as well?”
“Why, naturally. What did you expect?”
“Just that, I suppose, if Berthin really hasn’t made the grade with you.”
“I’ve told you before—there’s never been any question of—!”
“All right, all right, though you don’t mind my saying you must want them superworthy, if Cousin B. couldn’t get on to your short list? And another thing—I warn you I shall expect proper notice of your quitting the villa when you go.”
“Then you must tell Betsy so. She’s your tenant,” said Caroline.
“I’m telling you, and you can pass it on. And if you do make a moonlight flitting, I’ll have the law on you both, and how’s that going to look in the ‘Sidcup Echo’ and the ‘Belgravia Gazette,’ eh?”
How impossible it was to keep him at arm’s length for long! As Caroline relaxed, sharing laughter with him, she recognized the familiar veering of her responses to his raillery. Now she was hot in her own defence; now forgiving him, letting him under her guard, her whole will against him disabled by her love’s acceptance of him as he was—cut to a pattern which she had sworn she would never choose again, yet which (and how he would enjoy the irony of it if he knew!) she loved again in him and knew she always would.
He drove the little car faster than Betsy ever did. But with its greater power and its head start on them, his own car had the advantage, and they agreed that if Betsy could handle it at all and stayed on the road, they were not likely to overtake her until she stopped.
“Never mind,” said Paul. “It’s going to do quite a lot for me to find her stopped somewhere, with both, her and my car in one piece each. And once she’s through Fragonard, I’m hoping that she’ll have had enough; that is, that instead of going on up into the mountains, she will either come back on her tracks or make it a round trip and go down by the comparatively easy road behind the villa. You remember I met you and Berthin on it after he had taken you up to Fragonard?”
Caroline nodded. “How can we know which way Betsy will have taken?”
“A good question, to which the answer is—we can’t, unless someone has noticed the car, and the snag about that is that though I’ve just managed to lay on a twenty-four hour patrol of Fragonard, I’ve had to give the men the night off tonight, on account of the Fete. So there’ll be no one to ask. However, I shall count on her doing the round trip and hope to be right.”
“And if she does, do you suppose she’ll then drive all the way back to Grasse?”
“I’d say it depends on how much rage she has worked out of her system. If by the time she reaches the villa she has developed a conscience about taking my car and leaving you flat, she’ll go back for you. If not, she may decide you can get home as best you may and that the smart thing to do with the car will be to park it in front of the villa and label it ‘Collect.’ In which case—!” But Paul left the rest of his threat hanging in the air.
As they talked the car was climbing along roads which were narrow juttings from the mountainsides; at their outer edges unguarded to drops of thousands of metres; hazardous enough by day and death-traps to the unwary in the rapidly falling night. Paul negotiated them with the skill born of long familiarity, taking their straights at speed and awake to every possible danger offered by their blind corners. Frequently their width was little more than that of the small car, and Caroline had to wrench her imagination away from what might happen if Betsy, at her unaccustomed wheel, should meet another ear head-on and should not react quickly enough.
She and Paul, fortunately, overtook none and met only one—a smaller version of Betsy’s which gave no warning of its approach, bucketing round a hairpin bend, its lights clashing with their own, and causing Paul to make his horn yell, to whip his steering wheel over and to curse the driver under his breath.
That was shortly before the road levelled out to become a motoring right of way through the mimosa, and a little further on, at another corner, Paul had to “stand on everything” to avoid running into the back of his own car, drawn up directly ahead.
He said, “So!” at the same moment as Caroline breathed, “Betsy—” But as Betsy jumped out and ran back to them none of their attention was for her but only for the wreathing, insidious menace which had stopped her and would have halted them.
Smoke. Pillars of it, corresponding to the woody stems up which it crept, fanning out as the breeze caught it, drifting across the road, mushrooming against the background of the darkening sky and here and there breaking into sporadic bursts of flame.
“Mon dieu!” Paul muttered. Out of the car, he thrust Betsy aside so roughly that she almost fell, and then was running, tying his handkerchief, mask-wise, over his nose and mouth as he went.
Petrified, the girls watched the grey curtain lick round him, envelope him. Then Betsy was babbling.
“Caro, I only took his car on the spur of the moment—really! He lets Ar
iane drive it, so why shouldn’t I? And I was so mad with him that I simply had to get back at him somehow. Besides, it was all right at first, once I’d got the feel of the car, and there was practically no traffic. Until—until that crazy lunatic came along. He took the comer where he met me on two wheels, I swear he did! He hadn’t sounded his horn, and as near as not he had me off the road.”
“I know. We met that car too, so we couldn’t have been as far behind you as we thought,” Caroline put in.
“Yes, well—after that I completely lost my nerve. I came on because I dared not turn and go back. And then, when there began to be nothing to it and I felt better, I saw—that in front!” Betsy finished, gesturing to where Paul had disappeared.
But before Caroline could reply he was coming back to them.
Betsy ran to him. “Paul, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean—” But he detached her clinging hands and looked beyond her to Caroline.
He said rapidly, “There’s fire, only smoldering in some places, getting a hold in others, for a hundred metres or so ahead. On the right it goes deeper than I’ve gone in. The road is forming a natural fire-break, so on the left it’s as yet no more than some random jumped sparks which I hope I’ve stamped out. But the rest is creeping on towards one of the areas we haven’t cleared yet and is going to rampage if it gets there. And so—” now he addressed Betsy for the first time—“you and Caroline are taking your car to get help. Hop in!”
She twisted from under his propelling hand.
“I can’t drive through that! Not without you, please, Paul! I simply haven’t got what it takes—”
“Then you must find what it takes.” His tone brooked no argument. “I’m not coming. I’ve got to stay here and do what I can—start cutting another fire-break, for one thing. But you needn’t drive through it; less than half a kilometre behind you there’s a fork that will take you on to the road that comes out behind the villa, and you ought to make it in under half an hour. When you get there, ring Fire at both Villon and Grasse and call Berthin too. Yes, and for good measure, you can also ring Grasse 0-38, ask to speak to Ariane, apologize to her for me, ask if her host can see her back to Cannes and tell her where I am. And now step on it, there’s a good child. There’s no time to spare.”
Dumbly, obediently, she got into the driving seat and switched on as he went to open the other door for Caroline, though holding her back for a moment as she was about to get in.
For her ears, not for Betsy’s, he said, “I daren’t be kinder, or she’ll go all to pieces, and she’s got to get this car downhill. But when you get her home, do all the rest for her, will you, Caro, including ringing Ariane?”
“Yes, of course.” At a sudden spurt of flame which lighted the whole scene, Caroline added, “How could it have happened, Paul? What do you suppose started it?”
“I don’t have to suppose. If he wanted to keep me guessing, my friend, whoever he was, should have taken his empty petrol cans away with him.”
Caroline stared. “You mean it was deliberate?”
Paul nodded. “Arson, no less,” he said, and stood silhouetted against another burst of flame as Betsy drove away.
CHAPTER NINE
THERE was no sleep that night.
With gratifying promptitude after Caroline’s telephone call Villon’s small fire engine roared up, stopping at the villa while one of the four-man crew confirmed the exact location of the fire. The others of the volunteer brigade were at the Fete and would be joining forces with those from Grasse and travelling up with them.
Berthin, on his way up, looked in for a moment. Such other volunteers as he had been able to contact were already speeding up to Fragonard by truck and car and even, in the case of two brother workers on the estate, by mule. He himself was taking five men with him in the station wagon, and he promised the girls they should have any good news there might be.
After that they could see by the winking lights of Villon that the little place, normally asleep not long after dark, was as alert and awake as they were, and intermittently for an hour afterwards there was the roar of other cars’ and motorcycles taking belated helpers up the mountain road past the villa. Then there was silence and only the dull glow in the northern sky which told its own grim story.
Marie made coffee and the three of them sat together, drinking it and talking. Marie made much of the drama of her memories of similar disasters. But born and bred as she was to the region’s acceptance of the forest fire as its chief hazard, she was reassuring as to the outcome.
“Ah, they are bad—bad when they happen,” she agreed. “But here we tell each other that le bon dieu who wills them has also given us the stout-hearted men to fight them. And always, but always! it is the men who win in the end. As it will be this time, you will see!”
“It’s good to think so. But it seems the one tonight didn’t just happen,” Caroline told her quietly.
The girl’s eyes rounded. “L’incendie prémédité? You mean this, Mademoiselle?”
“Monsieur Pascal believed so.” And Caroline told of the evidence of the petrol cans Paul had found.
“But who could do such a thing? Who could bear enough enmity against either Monsieur Berthin or Monsieur Paul to bring themselves to do a wickedness like that? Ah, bien entendu,” Marie shook her head, “one knows there are, here and there, masters of estates who almost deserve it. But not of Prairies Pascal! For this is a happy—” But there Marie checked, surprised into silence by the pistol-shot snap of Betsy’s fingers.
“Got it!” exclaimed Betsy. She turned to Caroline.
“Caro, that car! Oh, you know! The one I—The one you and Paul met, too—” Her words tumbled over each other. “D’you know what? I caught a glimpse of the driver. Not a good one; it was darkish, as you know, and I couldn’t swear to it. But. I’m almost sure now it was Henri Mercier. As Marie was talking just now a sort of picture of his profile snapped on in my mind—you know that quiff of hair he wears that makes his face so long? And André was at the Fete. But Henri wasn’t. And what was he doing coming down from Fragonard at that breakneck speed at that time of night, I’d like to know!”
Caroline caught her breath. For an intuition similar to that which Betsy was using on a momentary glimpse of a man’s face was going to work for her too ... On a recollection of Henri himself, Henri leering, “Arson? There’s a nasty idea to put into a fellow’s head!” Had she indeed done that? she wondered. And had Henri acted on it tonight?
But realizing they must not jump to conclusions on such thin evidence, she said,
“But even if you were quite sure it was Henri, which you aren’t, he might have been coming down from higher up the mountain and just passing through Fragonard, you know.”
“He might,” Betsy allowed. “But if Paul was right and the fire wasn’t an accident, it seems to me Henri ought to have to tell where he had been, because ever since that business of the fireworks at Paul’ party he’s made no secret of meaning to get his own back somehow, has he?”
“But surely he wouldn’t resort to such a terrible way of doing it?”
“You wouldn’t think so. But that man in that car, whoever he was, was running away from something terrible he had done,” said Betsy sagely, and Caroline, reluctant as she was to believe it, had to agree.
Dawn was breaking before the telephone rang and Berthin was on the line, ringing from Paul’s house where the fire fighters had foregathered for drinks before going home.
“It’s out,” said Berthin tiredly. “By cutting a fire-break we got it under an hour ago, and we’ve left a patrol up there while the rest of us came down for sleep before going up again on rota. But there’s little danger of its taking hold again now.”
“Oh, thank God,” breathed Caroline. She relayed the news to Betsy, who came to listen in as she said into the receiver, “And wasn’t it an accident, as Paul said he suspected it wasn’t?”
“Beyond mere suspicion, it was no accident,” Berthin confirmed. “After h
e had sent you down for help, Paul found even more incriminating evidence—a charred handkerchief with the name-tape still legible. And at about the same time as Grasse got the alarm from you, the police there had it from the fire-raiser himself. It was that fellow Mercier who made trouble with you that day I took you over the perfumeries, do you remember?”
“Do you mean he went to the police and confessed to firing the plantation?” asked Caroline.
“Yes. Apparently he panicked at the size of what he had done, ran for it and didn’t care so much that he had left the evidence of the petrol cans until he remembered using his handkerchief to unscrew the cap of one of them and that he hadn’t brought that away either. He could have taken the risk that it would never be discovered. But by that time, he says, he had regretted the whole thing, and claims that it was remorse which took him straight to the police.”
“And what will happen to him now?”
“Less than if he had waited to be found out, as he probably knew,” said Berthin grimly. “If it’s his first offence of the kind, not too much perhaps. But in France we don’t arrange these things very quickly, and he’s likely to be kept in doubt of his fate long enough to teach him that crime doesn’t pay.” Berthin added then, “By the way, would either you or Betsy care to speak to Paul? I think he’s just going to snatch a nap, but I can bring him to the phone if you like.”
Caroline said, “Don’t trouble him for me. But—Do you want to speak to Paul?” Covering the mouthpiece, she passed the message to Betsy, who hesitated, then refused the proffered receiver with a shake of her head.
