The Numbered Account (6 page)

Julia concealed wariness by laughter.

‘Are they really? Oh, what fun!' She thought quickly, and decided to use Paddy Lynch. ‘I have a banker friend who told me about them; that's why I asked Dr. Petrus whether any of his English authors used them—and uncovered all this story.'

‘A banker in London?'

‘No no—in Casablanca.'

‘Oh, Casablanca!'

Julia laughed again, and broke off with an enquiry about a church they happened to be passing; Herr
Waechter's historical enthusiasm deflected him, as she had hoped, from the matter of numbered Kontos. But all the way back to Gersau, through orchards that were pink drifts of blossom, she was worrying about one thing. Colin had said she had everything she needed to deal with Aglaia's numbered account; but she hadn't got the death certificate of Mr. Thalassides. And quite clearly, from what she had heard today, that was essential.

Chapter 3
Bellardon

On their return Julia was met on the upper landing by Watkins, who followed her into her room.

‘Mr. Colin was on the telephone for you at lunch-time, Miss. He seemed very much put about that you was out.'

‘Where from, Watkins?'

‘London, Miss. He gave me a message, and said you was to have it the moment you came in.'

‘Well what was it, Watkins?' Julia asked impatiently. What could Colin want to ring her up for?

‘He said—“Tell Miss Julia to get on with the job I gave her as fast as ever she can”. Really, Master Colin has a cheek, to be giving
you
jobs!—but that's what he said, and what's more he made me repeat it,' Watkins said indignantly. (She had dandled Colin as an infant, and still could not take him very seriously.)

‘Anything else?'

‘Oh yes—he gave his orders as cool as anything! You was to stay here till you get a letter from him, but to be making arrangements meantime to go and see the clergyman. He said you'd know who he meant. And he kept on saying—“Tell her to hurry; it's urgent”. Three times, he said that.'

‘Thank you, Watkins. Tell Mrs. Hathaway I'll come along to her in a minute or two.'

As she washed and put on powder Julia considered. Mrs. Hathaway really was much better. The doctor, who had been the evening before, had said that in a week or ten days she would be fit to move; he recommended that she should go to Beatenberg, above the Lake of Thun, for two or three weeks—the air there was peculiarly beneficial. Watkins had by now come to terms with Anna and the rest of the staff, so clearly dear Mrs. H. could safely be
left for the moment. And after supper she asked her host if she might make a telephone call.

‘Of course. To England?'

‘No—to a place called Bellardon.'

‘Is that in the Canton de Vaud or the Canton de Fribourg? I know it is in one or the other, but they are so intertwined that it is a little confusing.'

‘I haven't a clue,' Julia said airily. ‘Does it matter which Canton Bellardon is in?'

‘Yes, certainly. You see here we have an automatic telephone system, with a different call-number for each canton—you dial that, and then the number you want in the canton.'

‘Oh, not by towns? How odd! Well how am I to find out which canton Bellardon is in?'

‘The telephone book will tell us that.' It did—Bellardon was in the Canton de Fribourg, whose call-number was 037. (They all begin with an o.) Julia looked through the two or three pages of the Bellardon section, searching for the name de Ritter; it was not under R, nor under D.

‘I can't find him!' she exclaimed.

‘Whom do you seek?' Herr Waechter asked.

‘A Monsieur de Ritter, at Bellardon.'

‘Oh, the Pastor—yes, such a brilliant man. Look under Pasteur, and you will find him.' And among the Ps, sure enough, Julia found the entry—
‘Pasteur de l' Église Nationale, J.-P. de Ritter, La Cure, Bellardon.'
She dialled the two numbers, and was through in about fifteen seconds—the Swiss automatic telephone system works like magic—and the Pastor himself answered. Julia gave her name and said, a little deprecatingly and quite untruly, that she was a friend of his god-daughter's, and wanted to come and see him.

‘Dear Mademoiselle, I have nearly 150 god-daughters!' the rich voice answered gaily.

‘All English?' Julia asked.

‘Ah no! Only two English ones.'

‘Well, Aglaia is the one, of those two, that I speak of.' (In spite of the automatic telephone, Julia's instinct for
caution made her reluctant to use the surname.) ‘But look, I want to come very soon, probably the day after tomorrow.'

‘Come from where?'

‘Gersau.'

‘Then you must stay the night.'

‘Yes, but I don't want to be a bother. If you would just book me a room in the hotel I can come in and see you.'

A loud, very engaging laugh came ringing down the line.

‘Leave all that to me. Just come!—telephone your train, and we will meet you at the station.
Au revoir.'
He rang off.

‘He sounds frightfully nice,' Julia said to her host.

‘Jean-Pierre de Ritter? He is one of the world's charmers. So was his father, whom I knew very well indeed. They are an old Berne family.' There followed details of inter-marriages with Waechters and Carmenzinds.

Julia waited anxiously for Colin's letter next day. It didn't come by the first post, but she took occasion to tell Mrs. Hathaway that she would probably have to go away for a day or two, on a job for Colin—she knew that Watkins would have reported his telephone call to her mistress.

‘More Secret Service work?' Mrs. Hathaway asked. ‘You know, my dear child, I do think they ought soon to start
paying
you for what you do. It all comes out of the Estimates, after all—which means out of our pockets—and I don't see why the Government should have your services free.'

‘Oh, this is a private thing of Colin's,' Julia assured her blithely. ‘Nothing to do with the Secret Service at all.'

But Colin's letter, which arrived by the second post, promptly disillusioned her on that score.

‘This business is turning out much more serious and more tiresome than I thought when I asked you to take it on,' he wrote. ‘It seems that the old boy, along with his money, deposited some rather hideously important papers. I only heard this when I was having supper with H. last night. He's in rather a flap about it, as indeed everyone
is, because we've heard that some
most
undesirable characters are onto this too, and may be taking rapid action of some sort about it. I didn't gather exactly what, but it is quite menacing. And when I mentioned that you were actually going to see you-know-who, H. begged me to lay you on and get you to function as quickly as possible. (He doesn't care to write to you himself, naturally.) But he laid it on me to tell you that it is really vital, repeat vital, that you should get these papers away from where they are and into your own keeping as fast as you possibly can.

‘So please get cracking, darling. Wire me when you are going, darling darling. Endless love, C.'

Julia sat on her pretty shaded balcony looking out at the silver gleam of late spring snow on the mountains across the lake, and frowned over this missive. Hugh again! How tedious to be mixed up in yet another of his jobs. But neither she nor Colin had ever used their call-note ‘darling darling' to the other in vain; if she couldn't help Colin without helping Hugh, so much the worse—but she would help Colin, come Hell and high water. She went and procured a couple of telegraph forms from old Herr Waechter—she guessed, rightly, that he was a person who still kept telegraph forms in his house—and presently took a telegram, neatly printed in block capitals, down to the small post-office. She was careful to use Colin's home address. The message read: ‘Yes I will darling but how tiresome stop Starting tomorrow. Love.' She signed it ‘Darling'. The fatherly old man in the post-office put on his spectacles to spell all this out. ‘Darling shall mean
Liebchen
, not?' he asked smiling—and Julia, smiling too, said
‘Jawohl
'.

She refused a drive with Herr Waechter because she wanted to catch the afternoon post with a letter by air to Colin—sitting in her little
salon
she wrote hurriedly that she was going next day to see ‘the parson person'; it was all laid on, and she would do her best. In view of what both Petrus and Herr Waechter had said she added: ‘What I haven't got, and
must have
, is a death certificate—
they won't play without. You must take my word for this; I learned it quite by accident, but I
know
. If you can get it in twenty-four hours, post to the Parsonage; if it takes longer than that, probably better send here.'

She paused at that point, and read Colin's letter through again. The passage about the ‘most undesirable characters' taking rapid action made her wonder if she ought to mention the curious episode of the girl at Victoria, but when she looked at her watch she decided that there wasn't time; she closed her letter and ran down, hatless, with it to the post-office.

On the way back she slipped into one of the lake-side hotels, borrowed a time-table from the porter, and looked out the trains to Bellardon. It meant an early start, and she did most of her packing before she went to sit with Mrs. Hathaway before dinner; even before doing that, and while Herr Waechter was still out, she put through a call to La Cure giving the time of her train, blessing the anonymity of the Swiss automatic exchanges. If this sort of thing was going on, one couldn't be too careful.

She was off next morning on the first boat to Lucerne, and continued by train to Berne, where she had to change. Her luggage there was carried by the same tall porter; looking from her carriage window Julia caught sight of the detective!—also seeing his luggage aboard the train for Geneva. Julia saw him first, and watched him furtively; this time he appeared to be much more definitely on the look-out for someone than he had been at Victoria. She studied his face again, and found it more attractive than ever. ‘Gothic' was undoubtedly the word for its rather harsh angles and deeply-incised lines; it was also intelligent, and the expression at once sardonic and gay. It was curious, seeing him again like this; she wondered what he was up to. Could
he
be one of Colin's undesirable characters?

Julia had time in hand, and she was hungry after a 7 a.m. breakfast; when the detective had entered his train she got out and went in search of a sandwich and a newspaper. Returning with both, hurrying through the subway
which at Berne Haupt-Bahnhof connects all the platforms, she ran slap into him, coming down the steps. He stared—then gave his twisted grin, and half-lifted his hat. Clearly he remembered her. Slightly disconcerted, Julia regained her carriage.

The lowland agricultural cantons of Switzerland, like Vaud and Fribourg, are little visited by foreign tourists, and were as unexpected by Julia as Herr Waechter's house. Sitting in the train, thankfully munching her
Schinken-Brötchen
, she noted with a country-woman's interest the methods of the Swiss farmers: the fresh grass being mown by hand in narrow strips and carted off to feed the stalled cows; the early hay hung on wooden or metal triangles to be dried by air as well as sun; the intense neatness of the gardens round the houses, with rows oflettuces and shallots, and a single stick to support the French beans, at present only a green clump of leaves at its foot. The houses themselves surprised her; she had imagined all the Swiss to live in wooden chalets, but here the houses, though deep-eaved, seemed to be much more plaster than timber. Now and again, towards the end of her journey, on her right she caught glimpses of a lake which a fellow-passenger told her was Neuchâtel; and on the horizon hung the blue shadow of the Jura.

She did not stay in the hotel at Bellardon, for the excellent reason that there is none. It is a tiny place, where tourists are unknown. At the station, where she was the only passenger to alight, Julia was met by a small dark-haired woman, rather beautiful, who said, ‘You will be Miss Probyn? I am Germaine de Ritter.' Mme de Ritter caused the stationmaster, the sole railway employee of Bellardon, to pile Julia's luggage onto a small hand-cart with a long handle, the exact duplicate of that used by Herr Waechter's manservant at Gersau; this she pulled after her out into a small sunny street, saying easily—‘My husband had to take the car, but it is only two instants to the house. We are so glad that you have come to us; we are devoted to Aglaia'—which made Julia feel fraudulent. They passed along one side of a grassy open space, closed
at the further end by the whitewashed bulk of a church with a tall bell-tower. ‘We think our church beautiful,' Germaine de Ritter said; in fact, in its solid simplicity, beautiful it was.

La Cure, the Pastor's dwelling, was a very large eighteenth-century house with painted panelling in all the rooms, and gleaming parquet floors—everything spotlessly clean. Mme de Ritter drew the hand-cart into the small front garden, saying, ‘Jean-Pierre will bring your luggage up when he returns for
déjeuner
—is this sufficient for now?' and as she spoke lifted Julia's dressing-case off the cart. She carried it herself up the broad staircase with its wide shallow treads and polished beech planks, and showed her guest first her pretty bedroom—slightly defaced by a tall cylindrical black-iron stove for heating—and then, across a wide landing, a bathroom with basin and lavatory.