Free In Spite of Thunder by John Dickson Carr

If you ever breathe a word to Phil about this, or about my agreeing to meet him at all …!”
    “I’m not going to tell anybody. But I’m too fond of you to see you involved in a situation that’s going straight towards another murder with you in the middle of it.”
    “Brian, get me out of here. I won’t go back to the hotel, if you’re afraid they’ll ring me up and lure me away; I swear I won’t. Now please, please get me out of here!”
    Brian stood up, taking out a note-case. Instantly a waiter appeared at his side and said something he could not catch under the thunder of drums.
    The curtains swept apart. Half a dozen remarkably undressed young ladies, three to each side of the stage, coiled down a couple of steps and moved out close past the spectators for what the bills described as a pantomime of the jungle.
    “Audrey! Wait!”
    But Audrey, who now seemed to hate La Boule Noire as much as she had previously liked it, stopped only when Brian caught her arm. That was the moment when they both saw Desmond Ferrier.
    He did not see them, or did not seem to. He had just pushed through the crowd to a table on the opposite edge of the floor, and he was striking a match to light a cigarette.
    Evidently he had left his hat at the vestiaire on the way upstairs, as Brian had left a black hat of the same kind. The glow of the match-flame illumined his face: a strong face, with heavy-lidded eyes and hollows under the cheek-bones.
    The nose was thin and aquiline, the mouth an elaborately mocking curve. Except for lines of bitterness or discontent stamped into the forehead or round the mouth, which Brian had observed at the Hotel du Rhône, that face showed as comparatively few signs of age as the ruffled dark hair a little shot with grey.
    Clear in the match-flame, briefly kindled, Desmond Ferrier’s eyes turned sideways towards a shapely brunette at the head of the dancers.
    The tom-toms hammered, the smoky lights shifting colour from white to yellow and then to red. The match was blown out.
    “Brian! What’s delaying you?”
    “Don’t you see?”
    “Yes, of course. Does it matter?”
    “I think it might. The last time I saw him, he was driving home with the rest of the party. A few questions might be in order.”
    “Brian, no! You wouldn’t dare!”
    “Now why the devil wouldn’t I dare? What special and particular privileges has he got?”
    Angry voices were crying at them to sit down or get out of the way. Brian looked down at Audrey’s eyes; he realized that he had no idea how much truth she was telling him, or how far he could trust her. When Audrey turned and bolted, through a group which made way for her, he followed her less because of indecision than because of a gesture made by Desmond Ferrier.
    Ferrier, much more primed with whisky than he had been an hour or so before, was signalling across the floor. And he was signalling to Dr. Gideon Fell.
    Meanwhile, as for Audrey …
    To leave that room was a weight off the lungs and brain. Brian picked up his hat at the vestiaire . As he ran downstairs, as the noise receded, he found his wits steadying too. At the foot of the stairs a long and narrow room, set out with chromium chairs and black-topped chromium tables for a lower-floor bar, stretched in brooding half-light to the door giving on the street.
    Audrey, flushed but steady of gaze, waited for him by one table with her wrap trailing from her shoulder. There was nobody else in sight.
    “All right,” said Brian. Automatically he began to shout; then lowered his voice. “Where do you want to go? My car’s outside, round the corner from the Place Neuve.”
    “Your car?”
    “Do you still keep forgetting I live here? In a flat not two hundred yards from the Hotel du Rhône? Where do you want to go?”
    “I don’t want to go anywhere. But I had to get out of that awful stuffiness before I fainted. Can’t we—can’t we sit down here? Won’t this do?”
    Again he conquered an impulse to