Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie
Cicely sat up angrily in bed.
‘Perhaps you think I killed her—stood up there in that plane and puffed darts at her from a blowpipe. Of all the crazy businesses!’
‘The whole thing sounds mad,’ Stephen agreed thoughtfully. ‘But I do want you to realize your position.’
‘What position? There isn’t any position. You don’t believe a word I say. It’s damnable. And why be so anxious about me all of a sudden? A lot you care about what happens to me. You dislike me. You hate me. You’d be glad if I died tomorrow. Why pretend?’
‘Aren’t you exaggerating a little? In any case, old-fashioned though you think me, I do happen to care about my family name—an out-of-date sentiment which you will probably despise. But there it is.’
Turning abruptly on his heel, he left the room.
A pulse was beating in his temple. Thoughts followed each other rapidly through his head.
‘Dislike? Hate? Yes, that’s true enough. Should I be glad if she died tomorrow? My God, yes! I’d feel like a man who’s been let out of prison. What a queer beastly business life is! When I first saw her in Do It Now, what a child, what an adorable child she looked! So fair and so lovely…Damned young fool! I was mad about her—crazy…She seemed everything that was adorable and sweet, and all the time she was what she is now— vulgar, vicious, spiteful, empty-headed…I can’t even see her loveliness now.’
He whistled and a spaniel came running to him, looking up at him with adoring sentimental eyes.
He said, ‘Good old Betsy,’ and fondled the long, fringed ears.
He thought, ‘Funny term of disparagement, to call a woman a bitch. A bitch like you, Betsy, is worth nearly all the women I’ve met put together.’
Cramming an old fishing hat on his head, he left the house accompanied by the dog.
This aimless saunter of his round the estate began gradually to soothe his jangled nerves. He stroked the neck of his favourite hunter, had a word with the groom, then he went to the Home Farm and had a chat with the farmer’s wife. He was walking along a narrow lane, Betsy at his heels, when he met Venetia Kerr on her bay mare.
Venetia looked her best upon a horse. Lord Horbury looked up at her with admiration, fondness and a queer sense of homecoming.
He said, ‘Hullo, Venetia.’
‘Hullo, Stephen.’
‘Where’ve you been? Out in the five-acre?’
‘Yes, she’s coming along nicely, isn’t she?’
‘First-rate. Have you seen that two-year-old of mine I bought at Chattisley’s sale?’
They talked horses for some minutes, then he said:
‘By the way, Cicely’s here.’
‘Here, at Horbury?’
Against Venetia’s code to show surprise, but she could not quite keep the undertone of it out of her voice.
‘Yes. Turned up last night.’
There was a silence between them. Then Stephen said, ‘You were at that inquest, Venetia. How—how—er—did it go?’
She considered a moment.
‘Well, nobody was saying very much, if you know what I mean.’
‘Police weren’t giving anything away?’
‘No.’
Stephen said, ‘Must have been rather an unpleasant business for you.’
‘Well, I didn’t exactly enjoy it. But it wasn’t too devastating. The coroner was quite decent.’
Stephen slashed absent-mindedly at the hedge.
‘I say, Venetia, any idea—have you, I mean—as to who did it?’
Venetia Kerr shook her head slowly.
‘No.’ She paused a minute, seeking how best and most tactfully to put into words what she wanted to say. She achieved it at last with a little laugh. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t Cicely or me. That I do know. She’d have spotted me and I’d have spotted her.’
Stephen laughed too.
‘That’s all right, then,’ he said cheerfully.
He passed it off as a joke, but she heard the relief in his voice. So he had been thinking—
She switched her thoughts away.
‘Venetia,’ said Stephen, ‘I’ve known you a long time, haven’t I?’
‘H’m, yes. Do you remember those awful dancing classes we used to go to as children?’
‘Do I not? I feel I can say things to you—’
‘Of course you can.’ She hesitated, then went on in a calm, matter-of-fact tone: ‘It’s Cicely, I suppose?’
‘Yes. Look here, Venetia. Was Cicely mixed up with this woman Giselle in any way?’
Venetia answered slowly.
‘I don’t know. I’ve been in the South of France, remember. I haven’t heard the Le Pinet gossip yet.’
‘What do you think?’
‘Well, candidly, I shouldn’t be surprised.’
Stephen nodded thoughtfully. Venetia said gently:
‘Need it worry you? I mean you live pretty semi-detached lives, don’t you? This business is her affair, not yours.’
‘As long as she’s my wife, it’s bound to be my business too.’
‘Can’t you—er—agree to a divorce?’
‘A trumped-up business, you mean? I doubt if she’d accept it.’
‘Would you divorce her if you had the chance?’
‘If I had a cause I certainly would.’
He spoke grimly.
‘I suppose,’ said Venetia thoughtfully, ‘she knows that.’
‘Yes.’
They were both silent. Venetia thought, ‘She has the morals of a cat! I know that well enough. But she’s careful. She’s shrewd as they make ’em.’ Aloud she said, ‘So there’s nothing doing?’
He shook his head. Then he said, ‘If I were free, Venetia, would you marry me?’
Looking very straight between her horse’s ears, Venetia said in a voice carefully devoid of emotion:
‘I suppose I would.’
Stephen! She’d always loved Stephen, always since the old days of dancing classes and cubbing and birds’ nesting. And Stephen had been fond of her, but not fond enough to prevent him from falling desperately, wildly, madly in love with a clever calculating cat of a chorus girl…
Stephen said, ‘We could have a marvellous life together…’
Pictures floated before his eyes: hunting—tea and muffins—the smell of wet earth and leaves—children…All the things that Cicely could never share with him, that Cicely would never give him. A kind of mist came over his eyes. Then he heard Venetia speaking, still in that flat, emotionless voice:
‘Stephen, if you care—what about it? If we went off together Cicely would have to divorce you.’
He interrupted her fiercely. ‘My God, do you think I’d let you do a thing like that?’
‘I shouldn’t care.’
‘I should.’
He spoke with finality.
Venetia thought, ‘That’s that. It’s a pity, really. He’s hopelessly prejudiced, but rather a dear. I wouldn’t like him to be different.’
Aloud she said, ‘Well, Stephen, I’ll be getting along.’
She touched her horse gently with her heel. As she turned to wave goodbye to Stephen their eyes met, and in that glance was all the feeling that their careful words had avoided.
As she rounded the corner of the lane Venetia dropped her whip. A man walking picked it up and returned it to her with an exaggerated bow.
‘A foreigner,’ she thought as she thanked him. ‘I seem to remember his face.’ Half of her mind searched through the summer days at Juan les Pins while the other half thought of Stephen.
Only just as she reached home did memory suddenly pull her half-dreaming brain up with a jerk.
‘The little man who gave me his seat in the aeroplane. They said at the inquest he was a detective.’ And hard on that came another thought: ‘What is he doing down here?’
Chapter 13
At Antoine’s
Jane presented herself at Antoine’s on the morning after the inquest with some trepidation of spirit.
It was by now second nature to him to speak in broken English once within the portals of Bruton Street.
He upbraided Jane as a complete imbécile. Why did she wish to travel by air, anyway? What an idea! Her escapade would do his establishment infinite harm. Having vented his spleen to the full, Jane was permitted to escape, receiving as she did so a large-sized wink from her friend Gladys.
Gladys was an ethereal blonde with a haughty demeanour and a faint, faraway professional voice. In private her voice was hoarse and jocular.
‘Don’t you worry, dear,’ she said to Jane. ‘The old brute’s sitting on the fence watching which way the cat will jump. And it’s my belief it isn’t going to jump the way he thinks it is. Ta ta, dearie, here’s my old devil coming in, damn her eyes. I suppose she’ll be in seventeen tantrums as usual. I hope she hasn’t brought that damned lap-dog with her.’
A moment later Gladys’s voice could be heard with its faint, faraway notes…
‘Good morning, Madam, not brought your sweet little Pekingese with you? Shall we get on with the shampoo, and then we’ll be all ready for M. Henri.’
Jane had just entered the adjoining cubicle where a henna-haired woman was sitting waiting, examining her face in the glass and saying to a friend:
‘Darling, my face is really too frightful this morning, it really is…’
The friend, who in a bored manner was turning over the pages of a three-weeks-old Sketch, replied uninterestedly:
‘Do you think so, my sweet? It seems to me much the same as usual.’
On the entrance of Jane the bored friend stopped her languid survey of the Sketch and subjected Jane to a piercing stare instead.
Then she said, ‘It is, darling. I’m sure of it.’
‘Good morning, Madam,’ said Jane with that airy brightness expected of her and which she could now produce quite mechanically and without any effort whatsoever. ‘It’s quite a long time since we’ve seen you here. I expect you’ve been abroad.’
‘Antibes,’ said the henna-haired woman, who in her turn was staring at Jane with the frankest interest.
‘How lovely,’ said Jane with false enthusiasm. ‘Let me see, is it a shampoo and set, or are you having a tint today?’
Momentarily diverted from her scrutiny, the henna-haired woman leaned forward and examined her hair attentively.
‘I think I could go another week. Heavens, what a fright I look!’
The friend said, ‘Well, darling, what can you expect at this time of the morning?’
Jane said, ‘Ah! wait until M. Georges has finished with you.’
‘Tell me,’ the woman resumed her stare, ‘are you the girl who gave evidence at the inquest yesterday—the girl who was in the aeroplane?’
‘Yes, Madam.’
‘How too terribly thrilling! Tell me about it.’
Jane did her best to please.
‘Well, Madam, it was all rather dreadful, really—’ She plunged into narration, answering questions as they came. What had the old woman looked like? Was it true that there were two French detectives aboard and that the whole thing was mixed up with the French Government scandals? Was Lady Horbury on board? Was she really as good-looking as everyone said? Who did she, Jane, think had actually done the murder? They said the whole thing was being hushed up for Government reasons, and so on and so on…
This first ordeal was only a forerunner of many others all on the same lines. Everyone wanted to be done by ‘the girl who was on the plane’. Everyone was able to say to their friends, ‘My dear, positively too marvellous. The girl at my hairdresser’s is the girl…Yes, I should go there if I were you—they do your hair very well…Jeanne, her name is…rather a little thing, big eyes. She’ll tell you all about it if you ask her nicely…’
By the end of the week Jane felt her nerves giving way under the strain. Sometimes she felt that if she had to go through the recital once again she would scream or attack her questioner with the dryer.
However, in the end she hit upon a better way of relieving her feelings. She approached M. Antoine and boldly demanded a rise of salary.
‘You ask that? You have the impudence, when it is only out of kindness of heart that I keep you here, after you have been mixed up in a murder case? Many men, less kindhearted than I, would have dismissed you immediately.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ said Jane coolly. ‘I’m a draw in this place and you know it. If you want me to go, I’ll go. I’ll easily get what I want from Henri’s or the Maison Richet.’
‘And who is to know you have gone there? Of what importance are you anyway?’
‘I met one or two reporters at that inquest,’ said Jane. ‘One of them would give my change of establishment any publicity needed.’
Because he feared that this was indeed so, grumblingly M. Antoine agreed to Jane’s demands. Gladys applauded her friend heartily.
‘Good for you, dear,’ she said. ‘Ikey Andrew was no match for you that time. If a girl couldn’t fend for herself a bit I don’t know where we’d all be. Grit, dear, that’s what you’ve got, and I admire you for it.’
‘I can fight for my own hand all right,’ said Jane, her small chin lifting itself pugnaciously. ‘I’ve had to all my life.’
‘Hard lines, dear,’ said Gladys. ‘But keep your end up with Ikey Andrew. He likes you all the better for it, really. Meekness doesn’t pay in this life—but I don’t think we’re either of us troubled by too much of that.’
Thereafter Jane’s narrative, repeated daily with little variation, sank into the equivalent of a part played on the stage.
The promised dinner and theatre with Norman Gale had duly come off. It was one of those enchanting evenings when every word and confidence exchanged seemed to reveal a bond of sympathy and shared tastes.
They liked dogs and disliked cats. They both hated oysters and loved smoked salmon. They liked Greta Garbo and disliked Katharine Hepburn. They didn’t like fat women and admired really jet-black hair. They disliked very red nails. They disliked loud voices, noisy restaurants and negroes. They preferred buses to tubes.
It seemed almost miraculous that two people should have so many points of agreement.
One day at Antoine’s, opening her bag, Jane let a letter from Norman fall out. As she picked it up with a slightly heightened colour, Gladys pounced upon her.
‘Who’s your boy friend, dear?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ retorted Jane, her colour rising.
‘Don’t tell me! I know that letter isn’t from your mother’s great-uncle. I wasn’t born yesterday. Who is he, Jane?’
‘It’s someone—a man—that I met at Le Pinet. He’s a dentist.’
‘A dentist,’ said Gladys with lively distaste. ‘I suppose he’s got very white teeth and a smile.’
Jane was forced to admit that this was indeed the case.
‘He’s got a very brown face and very blue eyes.’
‘Anyone can have a brown face,’ said Gladys. ‘It may be the seaside or it may come out of a bottle, 2s. 11d. at the chemist’s. Handsome Men are Slightly Bronzed. The eyes sound all right. But a dentist! Why, if he was going to kiss you you’d feel he was going to say, “Open a little wider, please”.’
‘Don’t be an idiot, Gladys.’
‘You needn’t be so touchy, my dear. I see you’ve got it badly. Yes, Mr Henry, I’m just coming…Drat Henry! Thinks he’s God Almighty, the way he orders us girls about!’
The letter had been to suggest dinner on Saturday evening. At lunch-time on Saturday when Jane received her augmented pay she felt full of high spirits.
‘And to think,’ said Jane to herself, ‘that I was worrying so, that day coming over in the aeroplane. Everything’s turned out beautifully…Life is really too marvellous.’
She seated herself at a table for four, where there were already a middle-aged woman and a young man sitting. The middle-aged woman was just finishing her lunch. Presently she called for her bill, picked up a large collection of parcels and departed.
Jane, as was her custom, read a book as she ate. Looking up as she turned a page, she noticed the young man opposite her staring at her very intently, and at the same moment realized that his face was vaguely familiar to her.
Just as she made these discoveries the young man caught her eye and bowed.
‘Excuse me, Mademoiselle, you do not recognize me?’
Jane looked at him more attentively. He had a fair boyish-looking face, attractive more by reason of its extreme mobility than because of any actual claim to good looks.
‘We have not been introduced, it is true,’ went on the young man, ‘unless you call murder an introduction and the fact that we both gave evidence in the coroner’s court.’
‘Of course,’ said Jane. ‘How stupid of me! I thought I knew your face. You are—?’
‘Jean Dupont,’ said the man and gave a funny, rather engaging little bow.
A remembrance flashed into Jane’s mind of a dictum of Gladys’s, expressed perhaps without undue delicacy.
‘If there’s one fellow after you, there’s sure to be another. Seems to be a law of Nature. Sometimes it’s three or four.’
Now Jane had always led an austere, hard-working life (rather like the description after the act of girls who were missing—‘She was a bright, cheerful girl with no men friends, etc.’). Jane had been ‘a bright, cheerful girl with no men friends’. Now it seemed that men friends were rolling up all round. There was no doubt about it, Jean Dupont’s face as he leaned across the table held more than mere interested politeness. He was pleased to be sitting opposite Jane. He was more than pleased—he was delighted.
Jane thought to herself with a touch of misgiving:
‘He’s French, though. You’ve got to look out with the French, they always say so.’