“How do you feel?” Dixon asked.
“Like a being revived!” She drew in deep gulps of the ice-laden air, turning her face up to the sun. “This is wonderful!”
They were very near. Suddenly he bent down and untied the rope from around her waist.
“This is as far as we go, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes.” Her heart was pounding unevenly now, warningly. “Are you tired?”
He did not look at her as he shook his head.
“Just in need of a smoke. We’ve come quite a way.”
He took out his cigarettes, looking across to the jagged pinnacles of the Maisons Blanches.
“All this meant a great deal to you,” he remarked with conviction. “I’ve been watching you on the way up. You didn’t hesitate once.”
He lit the cigarette, shielding the flame with his hand, an action that reminded her vividly of all those occasions at Les Rochers Blanches when the little flame spurting from between the dragon’s angry jaws had lit up the suspicion in his eyes. Was he still suspicious of her? Was that the reason why he had come? Or was there some deeper reason?
“Have you climbed much?” she asked.
“Not a great deal. Once or twice in the Bernese Oberland, around Grindelwald, and in Austria.”
He was silent, drawing on the newly lit cigarette. He was not going to press her to try to remember, she realized, but she knew that he was as tensed and doubtful of the result as she was herself.
Then, quite suddenly, she said, “Dixon, will you describe ... your wife to me as clearly as you can.”
“If you think it might help.”
He got up and moved toward the edge of the glacier, looking down into an icy crevasse.
“Adele was, I should think, about the most beautiful creature I’ve ever set eyes on.” His voice was steady, almost hard. “She was slim and lovely, with gray eyes not unlike your own and about the same shade of hair—a little darker, perhaps. She was my secretary for eight months before I married her. When we worked together she was grave, quiet and efficient. I couldn’t have wished for anyone more competent, and when I was away she looked after my affairs better than I could have done myself. She typed my manuscripts and always had them at the right port of call at the right time for me to correct and send on to my publishers. I had no hesitation about leaving her with the proof corrections when they came. In short, she was that somewhat rare phenomenon, a combination of beauty and brains!”
“And you were deeply in love with her,” she suggested gently.
“I suppose that sort of thing grows gradually out of such close contact,” he said. “I depended on her for most things, I could trust her implicitly. Or so I believed.”
He paused, and she felt herself grow rigid, as if this was the moment she had been waiting for. She stood very still as the snow-clad giants seemed to draw nearer to hear what he had to say next. She felt time was suspended, yet the shadows were already beginning to creep down over the slopes behind them and a rising wind was winnowing the soft snow along the ridge above the glacier bowl.
“I asked her to marry me.” He seemed determined to place the facts before her without offering excuse or self-pity with them. “The thing she wanted most, which surprised me, was to meet the influential people I happened to know on that strip of the Mediterranean coast that is always thick with celebrities. It was easy enough for me to arrange such a party. I had just bought Les Rochers Blanches about six months before that and never given a housewarming. I had been away a lot and Adele had been there most of the time on her own, with Annette and her husband to look after her. She had not made many friends, as far as I could see. I thought her the solitary type.”
He paused, looking at her in the bright reflected light from the snow.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized guiltily. “I can only be causing you needless grief asking you to go over it all like this.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said grimly. “We’ve got to go through with this ... for your sake.”
She stood waiting for him to continue.
“I gave the party three days before we were due to be married,” he explained. “It was a weekend affair, culminating in one of these cocktail free-for-alls that women seem to like so much. After it we went on to dance at Monte Carlo. It had all been laid on most carefully. When it was over we discovered that my guests had been relieved of some fifty thousand pounds’ worth of jewelry.”
She drew in a sharp quivering breath, but could not interrupt him even then to tell him that she had guessed what was to follow.
“Adele was the last person I suspected,” he went on harshly. “She even helped me by coming with me to the prefect of police and giving him all the information she could. She knew that I had made it a point of honor to return the jewels to their owners since they had been stolen while they were guests under my roof. I would not let it hold up our marriage, however, although she suggested that we might postpone it until after my next voyage.” He drew a hard breath. “On the day we were married I discovered she had taken the diamonds.” They stood in absolute silence. She could feel his eyes on her, watching each fleeting expression that crossed her face, yet she felt powerless to move.
The warmth went slowly out of the sun and the ice-cold wind seemed to be blowing directly across her heart. The reason for all the bitterness he had shown was plain enough now. He was not the type of man to forget—or forgive—easily.
“Adele’s last trick was perhaps the cleverest of them all,” he went on slowly, following her as she moved to the glacier’s edge. “She had packed her suitcase for the honeymoon we were to share and she asked if she might go through it and take some of her own personal belongings to Nice before we went to the police. I didn’t see any reason to refuse her such a small request, and when I went to her room in search of her half an hour later she had gone.”
That was all. He had nothing more to tell her. Perhaps he believed that she could pick up the threads from there if she had been Adele Cabot’s accomplice. Then, as these things happen, they became aware of a distant rumbling, like the low muted sound of thunder, yet it seemed to be sliding down the face of the rock wall immediately behind them. It was a sound that petrified her. It kept her frozen in her tracks, but Dixon was quicker.
He caught her, swinging her off her feet as the avalanche of rock and snow came down over their heads. Pressed close against the hard rock wall, she felt him brace his entire strength against its colossal force. They were swept into darkness and she lay against him, burying her face in his wet parka.
A holocaust of sound and fury thundered above them, but still he held on, gripping the rock on either side of her. He did not attempt to speak, and she would not have heard him if he had. All she could do was to hold on in an elementary desire for self-preservation that was no new thing to her because she had known the cold fear and rigid determination of it once before.
When the last stone had rattled across the ridge the sun came back to them as if it had been a light switched on in a dark room.
She drew a long shuddering breath, but he did not release her immediately. He stood with his arms still around her, offering her the continuing comfort of his protection as the gray cloud began to lift from her brain.
Gradually, as the mist rises and clears from the face of the mountains, now thinning to let in the light, now swirling back in added density, her mind grappled with the past. She was remembering.
“We traveled on the same train ... from Geneva,” she began unsteadily. “She ... your wife was so beautiful that I suppose I couldn’t help looking at her more than once. Then, in the restaurant car, we had to share a table. She had two companions...”
“Can you describe them?” he asked.
“They were both French, I think, and young. One of them had a tiny scar on the side of his head where the hair hadn’t grown again. I thought it looked incongruous—very white against the black hair. The second man was shorter and stouter. I thin
k his name was Jules or Julius.”
“Never mind! We can come back to that later.” His voice was infinitely gentle now and he waited, still holding her, until she found the connecting link in her story once more. “Take your time,” he said.
“When we found we were going to the same hotel we shared a taxi. We had discovered on the train that we were all keen climbers...”
Her thoughts drifted deeper into the past, but she did not voice them because he would only be interested in the events that directly concerned his wife. Desperately she struggled to remember the details.
“There was another man. He seemed to be always there—on the platform at Geneva—in the train—at Martigny. He got down there. Your wife seemed to be afraid of him...”
Suddenly she was gripping him tightly by the sleeve. “Yes,” he said steadily. “Go on.”
“Dixon, it was the Frenchman, the man who came to the bay in the launch and signaled to the villa! The man with three fingers missing from his left hand ... he was outside The Silver Dragon that night ... when you found me there, waiting...”
“All right,” he said, “don’t worry about Anton Leroux. We have him in the bag. That part was easy enough. He was a well-known contact working for an equally well-known fence. He was arrested the night we saw him outside The Silver Dragon.”
“Then you did notice him?”
“Oh, yes.” He shrugged indifferently. “I notice most things!”
For a long time she remained silent, gazing from the comforting shelter of his arms across the gleaming expanse of the glacier. Then once more she willed herself to plunge into the gray mistiness of the past.
“We had lunch together—the four of us at one table. I had planned to go on to Bourg-St. Pierre to climb with a guide, but one of the men said he knew the Grand Combin like the back of his hand, so why not all go together? It was a tempting suggestion as far as I was concerned.” Her voice trailed off unhappily.
“I ... must have been very low ... very upset. I was traveling alone...”
“Do you want to tell me about that?” he asked gently.
She shook her head.
“It doesn’t matter.”
He didn’t press the point.
“We decided to go straight to Bourg, spend the night there and make the Valsorey hut in the morning. We left our heavy luggage at the hotel, taking only rucksacks.”
“Did you have your passport?” he asked, lighting a cigarette, leaving one arm around her for support.
“I’m not sure. Yes, I think I had.” The ghost of a smile hovered on her lips. “I’m that sort of person, I’m afraid. I kept it with me all the time. Yes, I feel sure I would take it in my rucksack with an extra sweater and the usual paraphernalia one carries. I remember we had quite a lot of food because it was early in the season and we might be forced to spend more than one night in the hut.”
Looking up toward the col, she remembered that John was still at the hut and hurried on.
“We planned to go straight onto the slopes. It was ideal climbing weather and ... they all seemed eager to get away from Martigny.”
“What happened about the parka?” he interrupted. “That would seem to be the clue to the whole affair. When you were picked up by the rescue plane you were wearing a red parka with ‘Adele Cabot’ sewn into the hood.”
“Yes, that happened back in the hotel at Martigny.” Her brows were drawn in a deep frown of concentration. “I had packed in a hurry. I ... wanted to get away from England as swiftly as possible and I forgot the most obvious thing. I left my parka behind. When I discovered that I had come without it I told Adele I couldn’t go with them, at least not till the shops opened and I could buy another and ... she said something about ‘Not wasting time.’ She offered to loan me one of hers. She came along to my room with it. She ... stood there in the middle of the floor while I tried it on. It fitted all right—we were the same build— and she seemed relieved. I thought it was very kind of her.”
She paused, as if she had to get every detail quite right.
“She stood looking at me for a long time, as if some sort of idea was forming in her mind. She was holding something—a cheap plastic handbag. It was black imitation patent leather. She held it out to me. Would I keep it for her in my room? She seemed afraid—afraid of losing it or of it being stolen, perhaps. She didn’t want to leave it in her own room, she explained, because the lock of her suitcase was broken and she had lost her key. I took it and put it into my own suitcase—in the pocket in the lid. Adele said she would get it when we came back. But ... she never came back!”
She shivered, covering her face with her hands as if to shut out too vivid a picture, and Dixon held her close. But he could not help her. She had to go on remembering.
“She never came back,” she repeated in a broken whisper. “She was killed—down there at the foot of the arete.”
She stood quivering in his embrace and he said soothingly, “No more! We’ve got the hang of it now. We’re going to eat something and go back to the hut for the night. You’ve had enough for one day.”
He took out a slab of chocolate, broke it into two pieces and offered her one, but she shook her head.
“Let me go on,” she pleaded. “There isn’t much more and ... I couldn’t bear to go back over it all again.”
He appeared to see the wisdom of that, but he would not let her speak again until she had eaten most of the chocolate and taken a long drink of hot coffee from the flask he had brought with him in a rucksack.
When she had finished the coffee she got up and walked back to the edge of the glacier, standing for a long time looking down at the blank face it turned to the sun, her mind a vortex of hurrying, conflicting thoughts.
Yet the main issue was clear enough. She knew now that she had never known Adele Cabot, that she had never set eyes on her or her companions until they had all met in the train from Geneva. She was English, and the name Jane Pettigrew was hers by right. It was all quite simple. A chance meeting in a train traveling through the Alps had thrown them together and a mutual love of climbing had done the rest. Far from being expert in the art, she had been glad—nay, eager—to go with them. Whether or not they had used her as a cat’s paw or a scapegoat was another matter.
She looked up from the glacier to the shores of snow on its far side, biting her teeth into her lower lip as she forced her thoughts back.
“We were roped together at the foot of the arete. There’s a terrible drop just beyond that slab of rock over there.” She pointed toward the distant treacherous rock face, which still had a glitter of ice on it. “I was last and making pretty heavy weather of it, I suppose. Then ... the rope seemed to slacken and come away. I was on my own. I began to slip. I was going down backward and I was terrified.” She closed her eyes. “It was the most horrible thing I’ve ever experienced—all that snow and just going down with nothing to hold on to! Then, somewhere high up above me, I could hear thunder—the stealthy thunder of an avalanche. I must have gone down on the edge of it. Someone screamed. Perhaps I tried to scream, too, but I don’t think any sound came. I saw someone hurtle past me—legs and arms and a rucksack all tangled up in the loose snow. Then something hit me and the whole world went black...”
She had no more to tell him and he had nothing to say to her for a moment. He stood quite still, facing the westering sun and the deep crevasse on the edge of the arrested river of ice where the woman he had loved and made his wife had hurtled to her death. What he thought or felt about the past Jane could not know.
At last he turned toward her.
“Thank you, Jane,” he said, “for making the effort.”
Her lips trembled. It was the first time he had used her real name and it seemed to come so readily to his lips, but she could mean nothing to him. He was the sort of man who would love once and never again in quite the same way.
And now that she knew the truth about herself she would return to England and never see him again.
John had come out to meet them and he seemed to guess instinctively that her afternoon had been one of painful remembering. He looked at Dixon and nodded, and Dixon looked straight back at him.
“No more for now,” he said briefly. “We’ll stay the night at the hut.”
John was quite agreeable. They had the cabane to themselves until three o’clock in the morning when two climbers joined them, letting in an icy blast of mountain air and a long wedge of moonlight.
Trying to make as little noise as possible, they still managed to waken Dixon and John, who sat smoking and talking until the sun came up over the rim of the Grand Combin.
When they finally roused their sleeping companion John knew all that Dixon could tell him about Jane.
They ate the remainder of the food they had brought with them and set out for Bourg-St. Pierre, the sun tinting their shadows a bluish purple on the snow ahead of them until they came, at length, to the green haven of the flower-starred meadows.
At the little Hotel du Dejeuner de Napoleon I they ate a second breakfast and picked up the Mercedes.
John kept looking at her all the way back to the clinic, but Jane knew that she was quite free now. Free of the amnesia at least.
If it had left her with other memories that hurt and would have been better forgotten, she did not want to tell him so.
The professor was overjoyed with the result of their journey, although it left him with a good many ends to tie up. He had, for instance, to notify the police about the mistake he had made.
John came to see Jane in her room. The professor had sent her to bed for the day and it irked her. She felt confined and fretted because so much could be happening without her knowing about it. Dixon, for instance, could have gone back to Nice.
The Silver Dragon Page 15
