The Numbered Account (33 page)

Julia, convulsed with unseasonable laughter, once more called up from the foot of the ladder, again shaking it—‘John, do please come down! They're
here
!'

‘Why on earth must the municipality cause anyone to make that filthy row? Now it's gone,' he said indignantly, starting to climb down the reddish rungs. Naturally he had to do this backwards, and therefore could not see, as Julia did, what was taking place on the plank-walk some distance upstream. The stout lady, apparently determined to go back and see the Alpenhorn in action, steadily returned on her tracks, ignoring Borovali's imploring gestures, but within twenty yards she came face to face with Wright and his short Germanic-looking companion. The wooden path was so narrow that it was impossible for people to pass one another without goodwill on both sides, including a certain flattening of the person against either the rock wall or the rail overhanging the water—and Wright displayed no such goodwill. On the contrary he stood scowling, effectively blocking the stout woman's path. There was an altercation, diagramatically visible to Julia, though of course inaudible because of the roaring noise of the river; arms were raised in angry gestures, the woman tried to push past, Wright continued to obstruct her, Borovali wrung his hands. While this was still going on Julia saw Colin coming round the bend in the gorge from beyond which the Alpenhorn continued to resound, and approaching the other group.

‘Now, what were you shouting about?' Antrobus asked Julia, wiping traces of red paint off his hands with a tuft of grass snatched from the rock-face. ‘I couldn't hear a thing.'

‘Look,' Julia said, pointing.

The four people now formed a sort of angry knot, completely blocking the cat-walk.

‘Which of them has the stuff, Wright or the woman?' Antrobus asked hastily.

‘How should
I
know? He's still got the brief-case, but she's got a bag big enough to hold the Treaty of Versailles,' Julia replied.

Antrobus started forward towards the group as Colin bore down on them from behind; they were all so engrossed in their altercation that they never noticed the two Englishmen till they were almost upon them. Colin, saying ‘
Verzeihung'
and ‘
Pardon'
very politely, pushed right in among them, and with a swift movement wrenched the black brief-case out of Wright's hand; the next second he was racing away in the direction whence he had come. Wright whipped out a revolver from the pocket of those pale corduroy slacks which Julia had so recently seen hanging up in a bedroom in the Golden Bear; but Antrobus leapt onto the slender rail like a cat, took one step along it past the three solid bodies of Borovali, the German man, and the German woman, and even as he sprang down behind them onto the plank-walk knocked up Wright's wrist—a little pale puff of limestone dust showed where the bullet had hit harmlessly on the cliff overhead.

Wright, furious, instantly tried to turn the revolver onto him; Antrobus struggled to wrest it out of the other's hand—they grappled confusedly on the narrow path. The stout woman now took a hand; raising her enormous tartan bag she bashed at Antrobus's head with it—Antrobus ducked. The bag was one of those open-topped ones, and out of it now fell, not the Treaty of Versailles or any other documents, but a positive shower of packets of chocolate, bags of biscuits—which burst—oranges, bananas, and some knitting; finally a tiny pistol dropped onto the planking among the edibles—this, with a quick movement of one foot, Antrobus kicked off the boards into the river, while he went on wrestling with Wright for the possession of his revolver.

Meanwhile Julia, who had come forward from the foot
of the ladder to watch what was going on, saw that Colin's get-away with the black brief-case was hopelessly blocked by some twenty tourists, who came round the bend in the gorge, whence the Alpenhorn continued to blare out its cheerful notes, in a solid block. He checked, looked behind him, saw her, and came running back, right up to the others.

‘Over to you, darling,' he shouted above the roar of the river, and pitched the black brief-case clean over all their heads; it fell with a plonk on the boards at Julia's feet.

But there were more than two revolvers in that party—June had been quite right. Mr. Borovali now extracted one, not without trouble, from somewhere about his stout person, and called out—‘Please put up your hands, all of you. I am armed.'

Antrobus paid no attention whatever to this; he was entirely concentrated on his struggle with Wright, who was as muscular and elastic as an eel. ‘Look out, John!' Julia called to him, snatching up the brief-case as she spoke. But just then a second revolver-shot rang out. For a moment Julia thought that Borovali had fired, but she was wrong; Wright had managed to put a shot through Antrobus's leg. Antrobus lost his temper, and exerting the unnatural strength of fury and self-preservation heaved the younger and lighter man up and pitched him bodily, revolver and all, over the railing into the swirling Aar below—the onlookers saw the dark head sink, rise, sink again, rise again, as he was whirled along between the rocks; he was attempting feebly to swim when the green waters bore him out of sight round the bulge in the cliff against which the ladder stood.

Again several things happened more or less at once. Julia, ignoring Wright in the river, from behind twitched Borovali's revolver from his outstretched hand while he stood staring at his colleague in the water, and slipped it into the pocket of her wind-jacket; Colin hurried up to Antrobus; the group of tourists, hearing revolver-shots and seeing a man thrown into the river recoiled, pressing one another backwards—all but one burly individual, who
thrust his way to the front demanding, in the unmistakable tones of an English policeman—‘What goes on 'ere?'

No one paid much attention to him. Antrobus had sunk down on one knee; from the trouser on his other leg, which was stuck out awkwardly in front of him, blood was streaming over the plank-walk, soaking into the biscuits and packets of chocolate from the German woman's bag. Julia, in an agony, called out—‘Oh, Colin, do see how bad it is.'

Antrobus heard her.

‘Clear off, Julia—the key's in the car. Take that thing away—Colin will see to me.'

This told Julia that Antrobus, in spite of his struggles with Wright, realised that Colin had passed her the black brief-case. For a moment she hesitated—there was John, pouring with blood before her eyes; could she leave him? It was in fact Borovali who decided her to do what Antrobus asked—he wheeled round on her, saying—‘It is you who took my weapon?'

‘Goodness no! What weapon?' But Julia was full of a blind instinctive rage—at the injury to Antrobus, and at all these crooks who had brought it about; above all she was furious with the German woman. Even as she spoke she stepped past Borovali and snatched the vast tartan bag off the fat creature's arm, and then turned and ran like a deer down the plank-walk into the tunnel, leaving the others staring after her.

She ran all the way through the tunnel too—only when she was approaching the exit did she slow down. Oh gracious, would the man want her ticket? John had got them. But the official at the gate was busy with a swarm of tourists eager to enter, and when she said, ‘Just now I came in with the
Englischer Herr,'
he let her pass.

In the open restaurant the first person she saw was Chambertin, no longer sitting at a table but standing talking with two other men, one of whom she recognised as Müller, the detective who had sat in the Gemsbock garden, and shadowed Wright and Borovali to the police-station. She hurried over to them.

‘Monsieur Chambertin, can you get hold of a doctor? Mr. Antrobus has been shot.'

‘Shot? Where?'

‘In the leg,' Julia said idiotically, thinking only of Antrobus.

‘But in what circumstances?' Chambertin asked, looking concerned.

‘Oh, by those ruffians in there—in the gorge. And one of them is in the river,' she added needlessly, with a rather hysterical laugh.

The man who was not Müller rounded sharply on her.

‘How came he in the river, Fräulein?'

‘Oh, go in and ask! There are dozens of people in there who saw it all.' She turned to Chambertin. ‘But do get a doctor quickly, can't you? He may bleed to death,' she said urgently, and started away towards the car-park.

Chambertin followed her, and while she was fiddling with the controls on the dash-board of Antrobus's big Porsche, all completely unfamiliar to her, he poked his head in at the window.

‘And you, Mademoiselle? Where do you go now?'

‘But to my hotel. I have a friend there, an elderly English lady, who is unwell. I must get back to her.'

‘Your hotel is in Interlaken?'

Julia noticed that the man who had asked her how Wright came to be in the river had also come up to the car, and stood beside Chambertin, listening intently. Was this the Swiss police chief, von Allmen or whatever his name was, who had given away the business of the bus-tour to Chambertin? Anyhow she could only speak the truth.

‘No, up at Beatenberg—the Silberhorn. Goodbye, Monsieur Chambertin—do
please
get a doctor at once.' She let in the clutch and shot away out of the car-park.

Spinning down the road towards Meiringen, through it, and on towards Brienz Julia, in spite of her anxiety about Antrobus, began to do some hard thinking. Since she had got both the brief-case and the German lady's tartan bag presumably she had got the papers, there on the seat beside her in the car—including the documents
which John didn't want the Swiss police to see. And John had entrusted her with the job of taking them away, and ‘clearing off'. Well she had cleared off; but she would like to find out as soon as possible if she really had got ‘the doings', as she privately phrased it; and then she must think of somewhere to put them. If the third man with Chambertin was the Interlaken Chief of Police, or any form of police, he now knew her address, and nothing could stop him from searching the hotel. Oh dear!

Brienz has a rather narrow street, which on fine weekends is apt to be jammed with cars. Julia was more than once brought to a halt where single-line traffic was coming towards her—and she noticed in her driving-mirror that a small grey Volkswagen, with two men in it, was immediately behind her. Through Brienz, in the open country beyond, she slowed down with the idea of looking at the contents of the two cases, and waved the grey Volkswagen on. But it did not pass her—it slowed down too. ‘Oh, bloody police-car, I suppose,' she muttered irritably, and shot on again.

The Porsche, if pressed, had the legs of the Volkswagen; Julia pressed it, and soon left the smaller car behind and out of sight. Then she again thought hard. Where could she go, short of the Hotel Silberhorn, to examine the contents of the two bags without interruption?

A ladies' lavatory is one of the few places where a woman can be certain of being alone and undisturbed, and as Julia drove along the shore of the Lake of Brienz she remembered the large, exquisitely clean ‘Ladies' in the Hotel zum Fluss at Interlaken, which she had visited when she brought Mrs. Hathaway down from the Schynige-Platte, and acquired so much useful information from the hotel porter. The very thing!—moreover, it was not on the direct route to Beatenberg, but lay in the opposite direction, involving a double-back on her tracks, so that it might throw those snoopers in the grey car off the scent. Grinning with satisfaction, she swung over the road bridge across the Aar at Interlaken, turned left, and passing the Englischer Garten with its dull statue and its beautiful
silver poplars, pulled in to the open car-park where the Brienz steamers have their landing-stage. The ‘Ladies' at the Fluss had, she remembered, a separate entrance giving on to this; no need to go through the lounge past the chatty old porter. Grasping both bags, Julia hastened in at the side door, through the outer wash-room, and into one of the actual lavatories; there she bolted the door and began to examine her booty.

She had worried rather on her way as to whether the black brief-case might be locked, but it wasn't; the two clips sprang up at the touch of her fingers. Eagerly she raised the flap and looked in—to see large quantities of old newspapers! Then it occurred to her that the documents might have been wrapped in these, and she hastily unfolded and shook out every single copy of the
Journal de Genève,
the
Gazette de Lausanne,
and the
Continental Daily Mail,
thinking as she did so that these must represent Borovali's and Wright's tastes in newspapers respectively. No—only newspapers. Could everything have gone wrong, and John been wounded for nothing? However, there remained the German lady's tartan bag—she had already noticed as she carried it in from the car that in spite of the loss of all those comestibles which had been poured out in the Aares-Schlucht it did not feel like an empty bag; in fact it was quite heavy. (At the Aares-Schlucht she had been too hurried and upset to notice anything.) Stuffing the useless newspapers behind the lavatory seat, Julia, her fingers actually trembling, tackled the tartan bag.

In it, just below the broad imitation-leather band which bound the open top there was a second compartment with a zip fastener, running the whole length of one side of the bag. The zip was secured with a silly little imitation-gilt padlock, but it was a cheaply-made affair; Julia fished a tiny nail-file out of her handbag, slipped it through the ring of the padlock, and wrapping her handkerchief round her fingers wrenched the thing off, and pulled back the zip.

Inside she found a very large, stiff, shiny envelope, heavily re-sealed with black wax; as well, bundles and bundles of papers, folded narrow and long, some tied with
white tape, others not fastened at all. She examined these first, looking them over rapidly. Julia had been left a considerable fortune by her grandmother, and she was perfectly familiar with the appearance of certificates for debentures, stocks, and shares; the only thing which startled her about these was the colossal size of the figures typed or written in—here was Aglaia's fortune, and it must be vast. But that was not what John cared about. She turned to the big envelope, and hastily pulled out her Biro pen from her bag—the slender oval end of a Biro is perfect for opening envelopes without tearing them—rolled it along under the flap, cracking the black wax of the seals, and drew out the contents.