Mary Stewart: Nine Coaches Waiting

I said quickly: "Madame, you're upset. You don't know what you're saying. Now we're going to have some coffee, and we'll see you home.”

Across me Raoul said: "And if Miss Martin had been blamed? If murder had been suspected? You had made it common knowledge, hadn't you, that she and I-that there might be an interested reason to get rid of

Philippe?"

She said nothing. She stared up at him.

"Was that what my father meant when he said that the gossip 'might have been useful later'?"

I heard Hippolyte begin to say something, but Raoul cut across it. "On Tuesday night, Héloïse… who was it found Philippe had gone?"

"Léon did. He stayed awake. We were going to empty out the rest of the glucose and-"

"So you said. He found Philippe gone. And then?"

"He thought he must have felt ill and gone for Miss Martin. But there was no light there. She'd gone too."

"And when he couldn't find them, what then?"

"He sent Bernard out to look for them."

Raoul said: "With what instructions?"

She said nothing. Under the hammering of his questions she seemed to have come partly to life again. Her eyes were conscious now, blinking nervously up at him.

"With what instructions, Heloise?"

Still she didn't answer. She didn't need to. Her features seemed to flatten out and melt like candlegrease. Hippolyte said, harshly: "That's enough, Raoul."

"Yes," said Raoul. "I think it is."

He walked out of the room and shut the door behind him.

For a moment nobody moved. Then Héloïse came to her feet, thrusting me aside so that I fell over on the rug.

She stood there with her hands slack at her sides. She said, almost conversationally: "Léon. He's gone to kill Léon." Then she crumpled beside me on the rug in a dead faint.

I left her there. I remember leaping to my feet to stand like a fool on the rug beside her, gaping at the shut door. I remember Hippolyte starting forward and shouting: "Raoul! Come back, you fool!" He was answered by the slam of the front door. He turned with a sound like a groan and jumped for the telephone. I remember that, as he touched it, it began to ring.

Before it had threshed once I was out on the gallery and racing for the head of the stairs. There were steps behind me and William's hand caught at my arm. "Linda, Linda. Where are you going? Keep out of this. You can't do a thing."

Outside an engine roared to violent life. A door slammed. The Cadillac gained the road, paused, whined up through her gears, and snarled away into the silence.

I shook off William's hand and fled down the curving stairs. Across the hall, and struggling with the heavy

door… William reached over my shoulder and yanked it open. The lamp over the door showed the dark circular drive walled in with misty trees… a big black car… a battered jeep… the scored grooves in the gravel where the Cadillac's tyres had torn their circle. The smell of her exhaust hung in the air.

I ran out.

William caught at my arm. "For God's sake, Linda-"

"We've got to stop him! We've got to stop him!"

"But-"

"Didn't you understand? He's gone to kill Léon. He said he would, and they'll have to kill him for it. Don't you understand?"

He still held me. "But what can you do? You've been mixed up in enough of their dirty game as it is. Let me take you away. There's nothing you can do. You said yourself it was finished. What's it to you if they murder each other?"

"Oh, dear God, what's it to me? William"-I was clinging to him now-"William, you have to help. I-I can't drive a car. Please, William, please, please-"

The night, the misty trees, the solitary lamp in its yellow nimbus were all part of the roaring horror that enveloped me, that was only my own blood pounding in my ears…

He said quietly: "Very well, let's go," and his hand closed over mine for a moment. As the world steadied around me I saw that he was opening the door of the jeep.

I said shakily: "No. The other." I ran to the big Chevrolet and pulled the door open. It was the Valmy car. Héloïse must have had it down to the airport to meet Hippolyte.

William followed me. His voice was doubtful. "Ought we to!"

"It's faster. The key's in. Oh, William, hurry!"

"Okay."

And then we were away. Our wheels whined round in the same circle, skidding on the gravel. Our lights raked the trees, the lodge, the willows fronded with weeping mist… We took the gate cautiously, gained the road, and swung right.

Along the narrow, fog-dimmed road with its soaring dark trees; a sharp turn left, a steep little climb between echoing walls; right again, then a series of dizzy, whipping turns through the steep streets that climbed up to the town. Now we had reached the upper level, and were clear of the mist. We swept along a wide curved boulevard where lamps flickered by among the pollard-willows… A sharp swing right, and we scudded across the empty market-place where cobbles gleamed damply and a few flattened cabbage-leaves lay in a gutter like a drift of giant leaves. William had got the feel of the car now. We swirled right-handed into a badly-lit avenue and gathered speed. The lopped chestnuts flicked past us one by one, faster, faster, faster…

We were out of the little town. Our headlights leaped out ahead of us, and the engine's note rose powerfully, and held steady.

Ahead of us the road forked. A signboard flashed up in the white light and tore towards us.

We took the left for Valmy.

William was, I thought, as good a driver as Raoul, but Raoul had not only a start, but a faster car which was, moreover, the one he was accustomed to drive. But after a while I began to hope that even these advantages might not help him too much, for very soon after leaving Thonon we met the mist again. Not the tree-haunting grey mist that had risen from the lake to moat the Villa Mireille, but little clouds and clots of white brume, breathed up from the river to lie in all the hollows of a road that was never far from the water. Each time the car's nose dipped a dazzling cumulus of white struck back the light at us, swept over us, blinded, engulfed us, then even as the engine slowed and hesitated we roared up out of cloud again into the calm black air. At first the experience was unnerving; the moment of blindness was like a great white hand thrust against your face, so that you flinched backwards against the upholstery, and were conscious of your eyes' catlike dilation. But with each succeeding dive into the cloud the car's hesitation became less apparent and after a while I realised that William was losing very little speed. He seemed to know unerringly just how the road lifted and curved, where the mist would lie for fifty yards and where for five, and he sliced through the fog-patches with the confidence of the man who-literally-knows his road blindfold. He must have driven up and down it scores of times in the course of his job; it was even probable that he knew it better than Raoul, who for some time had lived most of his year between Bellevigne and Paris. We might catch him yet…

So at any rate I told myself, huddled down in the seat beside William and staring with eyes that winced through the marching clouds of mist to catch a glimpse of a vanishing tail-light round some curve ahead.

William said: "What was all that about, Linda?"

"What d'you mean? Oh-I keep forgetting you don't speak French." I gave a shaky little laugh. "I'm sorry, William. I- I’m not thinking very clearly tonight. I haven't even said thank you for coming. I've just rushed you into my affairs and used you like this. I-I'm terribly grateful. I really am."

"Think nothing of it. But you'd better put me in the picture hadn't you?"

So I told him the story from the beginning-not very clearly, I’m afraid, and with halts and pauses due to weariness and the fear that clawed at me, while the car roared on up that wicked valley-road and the night went by us smoothly as a dream. The dark road fell away, streamed, poured away behind us; the thin grey trees reeled past us into nothingness; the mist-clouds marched, fled, broke and streamed away from us in mackerel flakes like rack in the wind.