The Numbered Account (13 page)

He laughed. ‘This is quite amusing. I feel as if I were living in a
roman policier
! Very well—I will park in the courtyard, and will wait for you myself in that restaurant on the left of the station entrance, at one of the outside tables. This is extremely normal.'

‘That's right—normal is the ticket,' Julia replied.

Julia walked across one side of the rectangled bridge to pack, the Pastor returned across the other to get his car. In the hall of the hotel the concierge handed Julia a letter—it was from Mrs. Hathaway.

‘As soon as you conveniently can, I should like it if you could come back here, and take me to Beatenberg. I am quite fit to travel now, if I have a courier—and I think it would be well to give the staff here a rest. Herr Waechter has taken rooms for us at the Hotel Silberhorn.'

She thrust the letter into her bag, packed quickly, and went down. In the hall stood Antrobus.

‘Oh, are you leaving already?' he asked.

‘Yes—I must get back to Gersau, where I have a friend who isn't well,' Julia said deliberately.

He looked at his watch.

‘You will miss the last boat from Lucerne to Gersau tonight,' he observed.

‘No I shan't—I'm stopping the night with friends on the way.'

‘In Berne?'

‘Well if it
is
any business of yours, not in Berne,' Julia said tartly.

‘Oh, excuse me. Berne is on the way, that's all. Anyhow
bon voyage
—I hope we meet again soon.'

Julia hoped this very much too, but merely said, ‘On present form it seems almost inevitable, doesn't it?'

At that he laughed, and came out and handed her into her taxi. What a mercy they had settled to meet at the station, Julia thought, as she said
‘A la gare!'
to the porter.
The Pastor had managed to park fairly near the open-air restaurant; he rose from one of the little tables, her luggage was transferred to the Frégate, and soon they were speeding along the superb Swiss roads, the gentle country-side all golden in the evening light. It was late when they got in, but Germaine was waiting, pretty and fresh; the warmth of her welcoming kiss gave Julia a happy sense of homecoming. Over the excellent supper Jean-Pierre, to Julia's professional dismay, insisted on putting his wife into the picture thoroughly—Germaine was all interest and sympathy, and delighted at the prospect of having another guest.

‘Tomorrow? By then more asparagus will be ready,' she remarked. ‘You can cut it, Julia.'

In fact it was just as well that Germaine had been told, for when Colin rang up next day the Pastor was out, and she answered the telephone. Recognising an English voice—though it spoke excellent French—Germaine, who was much more security-minded than her husband, asked at once, ‘Would you care to speak with your cousin? She is here—Julie, I mean.'

‘Yes, if you please.'

While Julia was telling Colin to come straight on to ‘the house of Niemöller's colleague' Germaine was consulting the time-table. ‘Tell him to take the train of 15 hours 55 minutes to Lausanne, and change there. He will get a connection in a few minutes, and we will meet him at the station.' When Julia had rung off she said, ‘Even if he spoke from the airport he will have time to catch that train.' She brushed some fallen peony-petals off the table in the hall into her hand, adding, ‘Quite so much discretion is really hardly necessary here for internal calls; since everything is automatic there are no operators to overhear. But discretion never does any harm.' She returned to her stove and Julia went out to cut the asparagus for supper, and get fresh flowers for the dining-room.

‘Cut some roses for your cousin's room,' Germaine called through the kitchen window. ‘They are just beginning.'

It was Julia who took the hand-cart down through the clean sunny little village to meet Colin; he gave his boyish giggle over this novel arrangement. ‘Don't kiss me at La Cure,' Julia said, after his cousinly hug on the platform.

‘Why ever not?'

‘Jean-Pierre was a little suspicious because I signed that telegram “Darling”. I told him it was just a code-word, but don't go and wreck it all.'

‘Is he stuffy and portentous? How frightful.'

‘No. You'll see.'

Colin saw, over a late tea in the arbour beside the lawn, now festooned with the washing of a daughter-in-law. The Pastor was obviously studying his ward's fiancé with the deepest interest, and when they repaired to the study to talk
les affaires
, Julia could see that he was favourably impressed by the young man's passionate concern over the loss of the documents, and complete indifference about the money—he never asked a single question about that.

De Ritter told Colin that the Swiss police, very discreetly, were on the look-out for the party, and asked if he could supply a photograph of his fiancée? Colin, jerking his thumb out, an obstinate look on his face, said that he couldn't. He however produced the information that in London it was thought improbable that the impostors had yet left Switzerland; it was considered more likely that they would wait in this ultra-neutral country to contact their principals and hand over their haul. The Pastor innocently asked who the principals were?—Julia laughed at him. ‘He couldn't tell you even if he knew.'

It was settled that Colin should go on next day to Berne to see ‘our people' there, and take them Julia's description of the party of three; Julia then explained that she ought to return to Gersau, to take Mrs. Hathaway to Beatenberg.

‘But how you come and go!' de Ritter exclaimed regretfully. ‘We like
long
visits.'

‘Some time I'll come and pay you a proper one, and stay ages,' Julia told him, ‘when the job's done'—and rang up Herr Waechter to announce her return next day to take Mrs. Hathaway to Beatenberg the day after.

Later the Pastor drew her aside. ‘I approve,' he said. ‘A little immature still in some ways, but time will remedy that.
C'est un charmant garçon'
Colin for his part, up in Julia's room, said, ‘He is most frightfully nice, isn't he? As an in-law I can't imagine anyone I should like more.'

‘He's only a god-in-law,' Julia said. ‘But I agree.'

Though Colin was going to Berne and Julia had to pass through it, they carefully arranged to travel not only by different trains but by different routes, he by Neuchâtel, she via Lausanne—to the Pastor's incredulous amusement. ‘But you are in Switzerland!' he said.

‘So are some other people,' Colin replied.

At Gersau next day in the
salon
Julia, idly turning over the pages of a fortnight-old
Paris-Match
, came on a page devoted to Aglaia and her story; there was a full-length studio photograph and, as often with
Paris-Match
, a snapshot (probably bought from a servant) of Colin and Aglaia together, looking very lover-like, in the garden of some country-house. Julia was normally rather scrupulous about other people's newspapers, but in this instance she did not ask Herr Waechter's permission, but took the magazine up to her room and removed the whole page; she cut out the studio portrait, borrowed a large envelope, and posted it herself to M. Chambertin at the bank with a note clipped to it—‘This is the likeness you require. J. P.' The snapshot she put in her note-case.

Chapter 6
Beatenberg and the Niederhorn

Beatenberg is a mountain village perched on a ledge facing South above the Lake of Thun; its chief claim to distinction, apart from its remarkably beneficent air, is the fact that it is over seven kilometres, or nearly five miles, long. A bus careers at fairly frequent intervals up and down the long straggling street, set with hotels, pensions, convalescent homes and shops, from Wahnegg, at the head of the road up from Interlaken at one end, to the top of the funicular railway going down to Beatenbucht to connect with the lake steamers at the other—there is no way up or down in between, only sheer cliff. The drive up from Interlaken in the Post-Auto is rather hair-raising: for much of the way the road is narrow, with blind hairpin bends, and the bus vast; it proclaims its advent by blaring out a pretty little tune on six notes, and cars squeeze into the rocky bush-grown banks to allow the great machine to edge past, its outer wheels horribly near the lip of the steep wooded slope. A notice in three languages at the front of the bus adjures passengers not to address the driver, but this is cheerfully ignored both by the local passengers and the driver himself—if a pretty young woman is on the front seat there is often practically a slap-and-tickle party the whole way.

By this route Mrs. Hathaway, Julia, and Watkins—Watkins audibly disapproving of the blond driver's goings-on with a black-haired girl—arrived at the Hotel Silberhorn, a medium-sized hotel three-quarters of the way along that endless village street. Since Herr Waechter, brought up in the hotel trade, had recommended the place they had expected something rather good, and were startled by the extreme smallness of the rooms: Mrs. Hathaway's, a double room with one bed taken out, and a cubby-hole of a private bathroom, was quite small enough; as for Julia's
and Watkins's singles, they were like prison cells, though each had a minute balcony with a chair—and all alike shared the view: the whole Blümlisalp range stood up, white, glittering and glorious, across the lake. The keynote of the hotel was extreme simplicity—coconut matting along the corridors, the minimum of furniture in the rooms; but the food was excellent, served piping hot on plastic boxes with pierced metal tops, over night-lights. The huge plate-glass windows of the restaurant commanded the view too; waitresses in high-heeled sandals pattered to and fro across the parquet floor, their heels making a loud clacking noise; their activities were supervised by a grey-haired woman known as Fräulein Hanna, who appeared to be a sort of combination of house-keeper, head barmaid, and general organiser.

It was all rather scratch, but there were the essentials, as Mrs. Hathaway said: comfort, cleanliness, good food, and, from Fräulein Hanna especially, the utmost consideration. Like all English travellers in Switzerland today Mrs. Hathaway and her party liked to brew their own morning and afternoon tea in their bedrooms, partly because then it
was
tea, but also because these items were not included in the very high
prix fixe;
if one took both of them, and coffee after lunch and dinner as well, it added ten shillings a day to one's expenses. Mrs. Hathaway and Watkins both had small electric saucepans with long flexes which would plug in in place of any electric light bulb; on seeing these objects Fräulein Hanna, far from showing any resentment, enquired earnestly what their voltage was?—it proved to match that of the hotel, to her manifest satisfaction. All three of course used Mrs. Hathaway's private bathroom; the hotel bathrooms were kept locked, and a charge of five francs, or nearly ten shillings, made for a bath. Watkins was outraged by this. ‘Well really! How do they expect people to keep clean? And with all that water running to waste down-hill all the time!' (This fantastic charge for baths is in fact a thing which the Swiss
hôteliers
would do well to remedy.)

For the next two days Julia and Mrs. Hathaway explored
their end of the village. They found a nice little shop barely three hundred yards away, set in a grove of pine-trees, at which to buy their sugar and Nescafé; they walked gently up a fenced path between flowery meadows to the Parallel-Weg, a narrow road running parallel to, but a short distance above the village street, with seats at frequent intervals; they peered in at the open door of the cow-stable just opposite the hotel garden, and saw the huge cream-and-yellow Emmenthaler cows, still tied in their stalls, munching away at fresh-cut grass—out in the meadows the hotel cat, also white and yellow, sat at the edge of the high uncut grass in the evenings, watching for field-mice. Mrs. Hathaway delighted in the place: besides the exquisite view, here was peace, calm, and a native community leading its own pastoral life, untroubled by the tourists, who so early in the season were relatively few.

Colin rang up on the second evening to say that he was coming next day, and would Julia book him a room? He came up on the Post-Auto, which always pulled up opposite a petrol-pump next to the cow-stable; before dinner he and Julia strolled up the little path to the Parallel-Weg, and leaning back on one of the wooden seats, with not a soul in sight, he told her what he had learned in Berne. ‘They' had quite definitely not left Switzerland; they were waiting there to make contact with their principals, who would be coming in from abroad—meanwhile the Swiss police were conducting enquiries at all hotels.

Julia told him about finding the photograph of Aglaia in
Paris-Match,
and how she had sent it to Chambertin.

‘Oh well, I think that was quite all right—really rather useful,' Colin said.

‘You'd got one all the time, hadn't you?' Julia asked.