Read In Spite of Thunder for Free Online

going home to change his clothes.”
    Brian bowed.
    “Sir Gerald is quite right, Miss Catford. You must never put your faith in temperamental people.”
    “I—I beg your pardon?”
    “Beware of these painters, as Hathaway says. They insist on changing their clothes; they hide in telephone-boxes; you can’t trust ’em an inch.”
    “Oh, you’re all guilty of great enormities. I’m sure of that. I …”
    Suddenly Paula woke up. So did Brian.
    All this time he had been holding her hand. Her eyes, large and luminous hazel, looked straight into his as though rapt at every word he said. And yet she had not heard him, Brian thought; behind that gentle barrier lurked some emotion he sensed rather than defined. Hathaway sensed it too; a spark flicked the group; all gallantry dropped away.
    “Yes, my dear?” the older man demanded. He was like a sharp if indulgent uncle. “What is it? What’s the matter?”
    “Nothing at all. I was thinking—well! Of Berchtesgaden. Can that be seventeen years ago?”
    “Just over seventeen years. In those days they called you the Infant Prodigy of Fleet Street, didn’t they?”
    “Yes; that’s what I was thinking. My God!”
    Paula made a wry mouth and shivered and retreated.
    “In ’39,” she went on, “I had just published my first travel-book. I wrote the most horribly inaccurate descriptions, I fired off silly-clever political views, in a way that turns me hot and cold when I think of it today. And yet I wonder if any of us, really, is a bit more grown up now?”
    “I wonder too,” Hathaway said sharply. “You know why I’m here?”
    “Of course I know.”
    “Well, then! It’s about Mrs. Ferrier. Didn’t she ask you to give her an alibi in the murder of Hector Matthews?”
    “We can’t talk here,” Paula said after a hard-breathing pause. “Come with me, please.”
    “If we go into the bar …?”
    “No! Not in the bar, or I shall have too many. This way.”
    At the front of the foyer, facing the quai, glass doors in a glass façade glittered open as a party of guests laughed their way back to the hotel. To the right of the front doors, down two steps and past a newspaper-kiosk, the marble floor had been set out with easy-chairs for a lounge. Paula led them there.
    “You see, Sir Gerald, I’m afraid it wasn’t only your distinguished name that brought me from Stockholm. I had to see you before you saw Eve.”
    “Yes, dear lady?”
    “The Infant Prodigy of Fleet Street was a very silly person. But I was very lucky in one way. I must have had a guardian angel, or an innate sense of decency, or something else I haven’t got now.” Paula straightened up. “When that man Matthews went head-first over the parapet, and Eve screamed as she saw him fall, I didn’t use it as a news-story. I didn’t do what I’m afraid you’re trying to do now. I couldn’t hurt her that much. Don’t you understand? I saw it happen .”
    “You saw her push him?”
    “She didn’t push him. She wasn’t anywhere near him.”
    “Ah!”
    They stood amid leather chairs, with a sofa on which Hathaway softly put down hat and brief-case. Echoes struck and rattled back.
    “I saw it through a window. The others, those fat officers who were ogling her so much I was jealous: maybe they saw it, maybe they didn’t. I don’t know. But I was looking out of a window towards the terrace.—Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? I saw it happen!”
    “What did happen?”
    “Eve didn’t , that’s all. She wasn’t within twelve or fifteen feet of where he was standing. She called to him, I think. There was a little wind. All she did was bend forward at the parapet, and turn slightly to the left, and point at something on a hill below.”
    “Ah!” said Hathaway.
    That one syllable, so often repeated, might have been comic without its sudden note of enlightenment. Paula Catford stood motionless. Glass cases for luxury-goods, set round the walls with little lights inside them,