Nine Coaches Waiting (30 page)

Raoul had opened the study door and switched on the light He was waiting. I didn't look at him. I passed him with my head bent, and went straight across the study to the door that gave onto the salon.

I pushed it open.

I said wearily: "Philippe? It’s all right, Philippe, you can come out." I hesitated, conscious that Raoul, too, had crossed the room and was standing just behind me. Then I said: "You're quite safe now. Your Uncle Hippolyte's here."

For some reason-no reason at all-the others had followed us into the salon, ignoring the comfort of the study stove.

Hippolyte had taken the cover from the sofa, and now sat there, with Philippe in the crook of his arm. On the other side of the empty grate Héloïse sat huddled in a small chair of golden brocade. Someone had twitched the dust-sheet off that and it lay in a bundle at her feet.

With its light on, the salon seemed more ghostly than ever. The light of the big chandelier dripped icily from its hundred glittering prisms. It fell coldly on the white shrouds that covered the furniture, and struck back from the pale marble of the fire- place where Raoul stood, one elbow on the mantelpiece, as I had seen him stand in the library at Valmy.

I sat as far away from them as possible. At the end of the long room was a piano, a concert-sized grand encased in green baize; to this I retreated in silence, and sat down on the long piano-bench with my back to the instrument. My hands clutched at the edge of the bench. I felt numb and unutterably weary. There was talking to be done-well, let them do it, the Valmys, and get it over and let me go. It was no longer anything to do with me. I raised my head and looked at them down the length of that beautiful dead room. They might have been a million miles away.

Hippolyte was talking to Philippe in an undertone. In him, too, the Valmy likeness was strong; he was a younger, gender edition of Léon de Valmy-Lucifer before the fall. He looked kind, and his voice as he talked softly to Philippe sounded pleasant. But for all the gentleness, and the marks of anxiety and fatigue, I thought I could see in him the same hard force as in the other men-cooler, perhaps, and slower, but in the circumstances none the worse for that. My
deus ex machina
would be capable enough, thank God.

He looked up at Raoul and said in his quiet voice: "As you may have guessed, Héloïse drove into Geneva to meet my plane. She has told me a rather… odd story."

Raoul was selecting a cigarette. He said without raising his eyes. "You'd better tell me what it was. I've heard several versions of this odd story lately, and I confess I'm a little confused. I'd like to know which one Héloïse is trying to sell now."

She made a little sound, and Hippolyte's lips tightened. "My dear Raoul-"

"Look," said Raoul, "this thing has gone a long way beyond politeness or the conventions of-filial duty. We'll get on a lot better if we simply tell the truth." His eyes rested indifferently on Héloïse. "You know, you may as well cut your losses, Héloïse. You must know my father was pretty frank with me this morning. I suppose he may intend to deny it all now, but I confess I can't see where that'll get him-or you. I don't know what he sent you down to Geneva to say, but the thing's over Héloïse. You can abandon your-attitudes. There are no witnesses here that matter, and you'll certainly need my Uncle Hippolyte to help you if the hell of a scandal is to be avoided. Why not give it up and come clean?"

She made no reply, but sat there in a boneless huddle, not looking at him.

He watched her for a moment without expression. Then his shoulders lifted a fraction and he turned back to Hippolyte. "Well," he said, "since it appears that Héloïse isn't playing, you'd better let me start."

Hippolyte's face, as he glanced from one to the other looked suddenly very tired. "Very well," he said. "Go ahead. You rang me up in Athens on Monday night to ask me to come home as you were anxious about Philippe. You spoke of accidents, and insisted that Philippe might be in some danger. You also said something not very clear about Philippe's governess. Héloïse, too, spoke of her tonight-also not very clearly. I take it that this is the young woman in question, and that there have been recent and alarming developments which Héloïse has been attempting to explain to me. I must confess to some confusion. I am also tired. I hope you will be very brief and very lucid."

Raoul said: "You can forget Philippe's governess." (That was me-"Philippe's governess." He hadn't even glanced at me. He was a million miles away.) He went on: "She never was in it, except incidentally. The story begins and ends with my father. That was why I said this thing had gone beyond convention. Because your starting-point,
mon oncle,
is this: your brother-my father-with the help or at any rate the connivance of his wife-has been trying for some time past to murder Philippe."

I heard Héloïse give a faint sound like a moan, and I saw the child turn his head to look at her from the shelter of Hippolyte's arm. I said in a hard little voice I didn't recognise as my own: "Philippe is only nine years old. Also he has just been through a considerable ordeal and is very tired and probably hungry. I suggest that you allow me to take him downstairs to some reliable person in the kitchen."

They all jumped as if one of the shrouded chairs had spoken, then Hippolyte said: "Certainly he should go downstairs. But I should like you to remain here, if you will. Ring the bell, please, Raoul."

Raoul glanced at me, a look I couldn't read, and obeyed.

We waited in silence, and presently the door opened. It wasn't Madame Vuathoux who stood there, but an elderly manservant with a pleasant face.

"Gaston," said Hippolyte, "will you please take Master Philippe downstairs and see he gets something to eat? Have Madame Vuathoux or Jeanne get a room ready for him… the little dressing-room off my own, I think. Philippe, go with Gaston now. He'll look after you."

Philippe had jumped up. He was smiling. The grey-haired servant returned the smile. "Come along," he said, and put out a hand. Philippe ran to him without a backward look. The door shut behind them.

Hippolyte turned back to Raoul. I could see, I'm not sure how, the rigid control he was exerting over face and hands. His voice was not quite steady, but it was as pleasant and gentle as ever. He said: "Well Raoul, you'd better go on with your story. And I advise you to be sure of your facts. You… he's my brother, remember."

"And my father," said Raoul harshly. He knocked the ash off his cigarette into the empty fireplace, with an abrupt movement. "As for my facts, I haven't a great many, but you can have them. I only really came into the story myself"-here his eyes lifted and met mine; they were like slate-"this morning."

He paused for a moment. Then he began to talk.

He said: "I don't have to tell you the background to the story; that my father, if Philippe had never been born, would have succeeded to Valmy, where he has lived all his life and which he loves with what (particularly since his accident) is an obsessive love. When his elder brother didn't marry he assumed that Valmy would be some day his, and he never hesitated to divert the income from his own estate, Bellevigne, into Valmy. I have run Bellevigne for him since I was nineteen, and I know just how steadily, during those early years, the place was milked of everything that might have made it prosperous. My father and I have fought over it time and again… after all, it is my heritage as well, and I wasn't as sure as he that Étienne wouldn't get himself a son one day."

Hippolyte said: "I know. Léon would never listen."

"Well," said Raoul, "Étienne did marry, and get Philippe. I don't intend to distress you with my father's reactions to that fact; mercifully he had the sense to keep them from Étienne possibly so that Étienne would let him go on living at Valmy. But the immediate result was that Bellevigne's income was put back where it belonged, and I had the job of trying to build up what had been steadily ruined for years." Something like a smile touched the hard mouth. "I may say I enjoyed the fight… But last year, Étienne was killed."

He looked down at Hippolyte. "And immediately Valmy started to take the money out of Bellevigne again."

The older man made a little movement. "As soon as that?" Raoul smiled again. It wasn't a nice smile. "I'm glad you're so quick in the uptake. Yes. He must have decided then and there that something had to be done about Philippe. There were six years before the child inherited. The chance would come."

Hippolyte said, hard and sharp: "Be sure of your facts."

"I am. It'll save time and heart-searching if you know here and now that my father has admitted his intention of murdering Philippe."

A pause. Hippolyte said: "Very well. I'll accept that. To whom did he admit this?"

Raoul's mouth twisted. "To me. Content yourself,
mon oncle,
it's still only a family affair."

"I-see." Hippolyte stirred in his chair. "And so I went off to Greece and handed Philippe over."

"Yes. Somewhat naturally I hadn't tumbled to the significance of what had happened over Bellevigne. One doesn't," said Raoul evenly, "readily assume one's father is a murderer. I was merely puzzled and furious-so furious at being thrown back to the foot of the cliff I'd been climbing that I didn't stop to think out the whys and the wherefores. I just spent all my energy on one blazing row after another. When I went up to Valmy at the beginning of April I thought I'd find out how Philippe was getting on there. I don't pretend for a moment that I thought there was anything wrong; I told you, one doesn't think in that sort of way of one's own family and the people one knows. But-anyway, I went up to Valmy to 'sound’ things, as it were. And things seemed all right. I'd heard Philippe had a new governess, and I wondered-" Here his glance crossed mine Momentarily and he paused. He added: "Valmy was never a house for children, but this time it seemed all right. Then, next day, there was an accident that might have been fatal."

He went on, in that cold even voice, to tell Hippolyte about the shooting in the woods, while Hippolyte exclaimed, and Héloïse stirred in her chair and watched the floor. She made no sound, but I saw that the fragile gold silk of the chair-arm had ripped under her nails. Raoul was watching her now. There was no expression whatever on his face.

"Even then," he said, "I didn't suspect what was really going on. Why should I? I blamed myself bitterly for that later, but I tell you, one doesn't think that way." He dropped his cigarette-stub onto the hearth, and turned away to crush it out with his heel. He said a little wearily, as if to himself: "Perhaps I did suspect; I don't know. I think I may have fought against suspecting." He looked at his uncle. "Can you understand that?"

"Yes," said Hippolyte heavily. "Yes."

"I thought you would," said Raoul. "A damnable exercise, isn't it?" He was already lighting another cigarette.

Hippolyte said: "But you suspected enough to make you go back pretty soon? And again at Easter?"

Raoul's attention was riveted on lighting the cigarette. "It wasn't altogether suspicion that drove me back. Nor did I see anything to rouse me into active worry until the Easter Ball- that night I rang you up. But that night two things happened. Miss Martin told me that there'd been another accident-a coping of the west balcony was suddenly dangerously loose overnight, and only the fact that she noticed it and shoved something across the broken bit saved Philippe from a particularly nasty end on some spiked railings underneath."

This had the effect of making Hippolyte turn and look at me. The expression in his face made me wonder, for the first time, what Héloïse had been telling him about me on the way from Geneva. From the look on his face it had been nothing to my credit. As Raoul went on to speak of the midnight feast with Philippe I saw the expression deepen-as if Hippolyte were being given a very different picture of me from the one he had got from Héloïse. "And there was something so odd about Héloïse that night," said Raoul. "She seemed frightened, if that were possible, and then there was Miss Martin's talk of night, mares… But it was really the second accident that shook me. I went straight to the telephone in the small hours, and eventually got hold of you. It seemed the best thing to do, for us to tackle him together and find out what was going on and force him to… see reason. I thought you might also hand the child over to my care if you had to leave again. I've no authority at all where Philippe's concerned, and for obvious reasons I preferred not to enlist official help at that point. Hence the S.O.S. to you." He gave his uncle that fleeting, joyless smile. "In any case, as far as the police were concerned, my father still held the winning card, which was that nothing had happened. He had, and has, committed no provable crime. But I thought that if you cabled you were coming home it would put paid to whatever he might be planning. If even then," he finished very wearily, "he really was planning anything."

There was another of those silences. Hippolyte looked across at Héloïse. Raoul went on: "It seems odd, now, that I should ever have been so slow to believe him capable of murder. I should have known… but there it is. I tell you it's not the sort of thing one readily accepts. It certainly wasn't the sort of thing I felt I could tax him with-and I doubt if that would have done much good anyway. If the interview I had with him this morning is anything to go by-" He broke off, and then gave a little shrug. "Well, I had sent for you. I'd done what I could to silence my own uneasiness, and I knew Miss Martin was dependable. I told myself I was being a fool. I didn't want to leave Valmy next morning, but I got an early call from Paris, and had to go. It was to do with some money I'd been trying to raise on Bellevigne, and the chap I wanted was passing through Paris that afternoon. I had to catch him. So I went. I'd intended to stay in Paris till Wednesday afternoon, then to come over here and meet you when you got in from Athens, and go up to Valmy with you on Thursday. But once I got away from

Valmy I found I was worrying more and more; it was as if, once I got out of his range, I could see him more clearly. Anyway, I think I saw for the first time that this impossible thing might be true and there might really be danger-immediate danger. I did ring up Valmy in the afternoon and got my-got him. I made some excuse-I forget now what it was-and asked a few questions. He told me about your cable, and I'll swear he even sounded pleased at the prospect of seeing you. Everything seemed to be normal, and when I rang off I was convinced yet again that the whole thing was a bag of moonshine." He drew on his cigarette and the smoke came out like a sigh. "But-well, by the evening I couldn't stand it any longer. I rang up the airport and was lucky. There was a seat on a night flight. I'd left my car at Geneva, and I drove straight up to Valmy. I got there early this morning, to find that Miss Martin and Philippe had disappeared."