Dr. Fell coughed.
“I have bored you with this at some length,” he apologized, “though the process of thinking it took perhaps three seconds while I wool-gathered in that bedroom in the presence of Miles Hammond, and the doctor, and the nurse, and 'Curtis' himself, who was standing by the chest-of-drawers then.
“To determine whether I was right about the Cagliostro-trick, it further occurred to me, should be very simple. There is a scientific test, called the Gonzales test or the nitrate test, by which you can infallibly prove whether a given hand did or id not fire a given revolver.
“If Marion Hammond hadn't pulled that trigger, I could write Q.E.D. And if Harry Brooke did happen to be dead as they claimed, it looked as though the crime must have been committed by an evil spirit.
“I somewhat impudently announced this, to the annoyance of Dr. Garvice, who responded by slinging us all out of the bedroom. But there were some interesting repercussion immediately afterwards.
“My first move, of course, was to put Miss Fay Seton in a corner and make her admit all this. I asked Dr. Garvice, in the presence of 'Curtis,' whether he would be good enough to send Miss Seton up to see me. There followed, from 'Curtis,' an outburst of nerves which shocked even you.
“Suddenly he realized he was wasting time; the girl might be up here any minute. He must get away out of sight. He said he was going to his room to lie down, and—bang! I could have laughed, you know, if the whole thing hadn't been so grotesquely wicked and bitter. No sooner did 'Stephen Curtis' touch his bedroom door, than you shouted to him not to go in there, because Professor Rigaud—who also knew Harry Brooke—was asleep and mustn't be disturbed!
“No, by thunder! He mustn't be disturbed! “Do you wonder, again that 'Curtis' plunged down the back stairs as though the devil were after him?
“But I had little time to speculate about this, because Dr Garvice returned with some information which thoroughly scared me. Fay Seton had gone. The note she left, especially that line, 'A brief-case is so useful, isn't it?' let the cat out of the bag: or, more properly, the raincoat out of the brief-case.
“I knew what she was going to do. I had been a prize idiot for not realizing it the night before.
“When I had told Fay Seton that if Miss Hammond recovered this matter would be no concern of the police, that was where she had smiled in so terrifying a way and murmured, 'Won't it?' Fay Seton was sick and tired and ready to blow up.
“At her room in town she had the evidence which could still send Harry Brooke to the guillotine. She was damned well going to get it, return with it, throw it in our faces, and call for an arrest.
“And so—look out!
“The alleged Stephen Curtis was really desperate. If he used his head, he wasn't dished even yet. When he crept up there in the dark, and played the Cagliostro trick, Marion hadn't seen him and hadn't heard any voice except a whisper. She would never have thought (and didn't, when we talked to her later) that the attacker was her own fiance. Nobody else had seen him; he had slipped into the house by the back door, up the back staircase, into the bedroom, and down again to get away before you others reached the bedroom after the shot.
“But Fay Seton, returning alone to a solitary forest place, with hanging evidence?
“That was why, my dear Hammond, I sent you after her in such haste and instructed you to stay with her. Afterwards things went all wrong.”
“Ha!” said Professor Rigaud, snorting and rapping on the table to call for attention.
“This jolly farceur,” continued Rigaud, “dashes into my bedroom where I am asleep, hauls me from bed, hauls me to the window, and says, 'Look!' I look out, and I see two persons leaving the house. 'That's Mr. Hammond,' says he; 'but quick, quick, quick, who is the other man?' 'My God,' I say, 'either I am dreaming or it is Harry Brooke.' And he plunges away for the telephone.”
Dr. Fell grunted.
“What I hadn't remembered,” Dr. Fell explained, “is that Hammond had read the woman's note aloud, in ringing tones which carried to a half-crazed man at the foot of the back stairs. And,” added Dr. Fell, turning to Miles, “he went along with you in the car to the station. Didn't he?”
“Yes! But he didn't get aboard the train.”
“Oh, yes, he did,” said Dr. Fell. “By the simple process of jumping in after you did. You never noticed him, never thought of him, because you were searching so feverishly for a woman. When you searched that train, any man, if he kept a newspaper in front of his face as so many were doing, would never get a second glance.
“You failed o find Fay Seton either, for which you must blame you own overwrought state of mind. There was nothing in the least mysterious about it. She was in a state of mind even less receptive to crowds than yours; she did what many people do nowadays if they are good-looking women and can get away with it; she travelled in the guard's van.
“That is a foolish episode leading to a last tragic episode.
“Fay went to London in a blank hysteria of rage and despair. She was going to end all this. She was going to tell the truth about everything. But then, when Superintendent Hadley was actually in her room urging her to speak . . .”
“Yes?” prompted Barbara.
“She still found she couldn't do it,” said Dr. Fell.
“You mean she was still in love with Harry Brooke?”
“Oh, no,” said Dr. Fell. “That was all past and gone. That had been only a momentary idea of respectability. No: it was a part, now, of the same evil destiny that kept hounding her whatever she did. You see, Harry Brooke who became metamorphosed into Stephen Curtis . . .”
Professor Rigaud waved his hands.
“But his,” he interrupted, “is another thing I do not understand. How did that change come about? When and how did Harry Brooke become Stephen Curtis?”
“Sir,” replied Dr. Fell, “above all things my spirit is wearied by the routine card-indexing necessary to check up on a person's papers. Since you have formally identified the man as Harry Brooke, I leave the rest to Hadley. But I believe”--he looked at Miles—“you haven't known 'Curtis' for a very long time?”
“No; only for a couple of years.”
“And according to your sister, he was invalided out of the Forces comparatively early in the war?”
“Yes. In the summer of nineteen-forty.”
“My own guess,” said Dr. Fell, “is that Harry Brooke in France at the outbreak of the war couldn't endure the threat constantly hanging over him. It wore his temperament to constantly hanging over him. It wore his temperament to shreds. He couldn't stand the idea of Fay Seton with evidence that would . . . well, think of the cold morning at dawn and the blade of the guillotine looming in front of you.
“So he decided to do what many other men have done before him: to cut free, and make a new life for himself. After all, the Germans were over-running France; in his opinion, for good; his father's money, his father's goods were lost to him in any case. In my opinion, there was a real Stephen Curtis who died in the retreat of Dunkirk. And Harry Brooke, in the French Army, was attached to the British as interpreter. In the chaos of that time, I think he assumed the clothes and papers and identity of the real Stephen Curtis.
“IN England he built up this identity. He was six years older, a dozen years older as we count time in war, than the boy who thought he wanted to be a painter. He had a reasonably solid position. He was comfortably engaged to a girl who had come into money, and who managed him as in his heart he always wanted to be managed . . .”
“It's odd you should say that,” Miles muttered. “Marion commented on exactly the same thing.”
“This was the position when Fay appeared to wreck him. The poor fellow didn't really want to kill her, you know.” Dr. Fell blinked at Miles. “Do you remember what he asked you, in the tea-room at Waterloo, after he'd got over the first nauseating shock?”
“Stop a bit!” said Miles. “He asked me how long it would take Fay to catalogue the books in the l
ibrary. You mean . . .?”
“If it had taken only a week or so, as he suggested, he might have found some excuse for keeping out of her way. But you swept that away by saying it would take months. So the decision was made like that.” Dr. Fell snapped his fingers. “Fay could destroy his new position, even if she didn't denounce him as his father's murderer. And so, remembering the suggestion from the life of Cagliostro . . .”
“I will clear my character of this,” said Professor Rigaud in a frenzy. “I once told him, yes, that a person with a weak heart might be frightened to death like that. But the detail of neatly placing the revolver in the victim's hand, so it will be believed she has fired the shot itself: that I do not think of. That is criminal genius!”
“I quite agree,” said Dr. Fell. “And I sincerely trust no one else will imitate him. You create a murder in which the victim appears to have frightened herself to death, at the sight of some intruder who was never there.”
Professor Rigaud was still in a frenzy.
“Not only was this not my intention,” he declared, “but—how I hate crime, myself!--with this added detail I do not even recognize the trick when I see it played in front of me.” He paused, drew a handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped his forehead.
“Had Harry Brooke,” he added, “any other such ingenious plan in his head when he followed Fay Seton to London this afternoon?”
“No, said Dr. Fell. “He was merely going to kill her and destroy all the evidence. I shiver to think what might have happened if he had got to Bolsover Place before Hammond and Miss Morell. But 'Curtis' was following them, do you see? With Fay Seton in the guard's van, he couldn't find her either. So he had to follow them if he wanted to be led to her.
“Then Hadley arrived. And 'Curtis,' who could hear everything from the passage outside the room in Bolsover Place, lost his head. His only idea was to get that raincoat—the blood-stained raincoat, the one thing utterly damning o him—before Fay broke down and exposed him.
“He threw the main electric switch in the fuse-box outside in the passage. He got away in the dark with the brief-case, and dropped it in flight because he was clinging so hard to the raincoat still weighted with heavy stones. He ran straight out of that house into . . .”
“Into what?” demanded Miles.
“A policeman,” said Dr. Fell. “You may remember that Hadley didn't even bother to chase him? Hadley merely opened the window and blew a police whistle. We'd arranged matters over the telephone to be prepared if anything like that happened.
“Harry Brooke, alias Stephen Curtis, was kept at the police station in Camden High Street until Rigaud and I arrived back from Hampshire. Then he was brought round to Bolsover Place for formal identification by Rigaud. I told you, my dear Hammond, that Hadley's task wouldn't be pleasant for one of you three; and I meant you. But it leads me to the one word want to say at the end.”
Dr. Fell sat back in his chair. He picked up his meerschaum pipe, dead with white ash, and put it down again. A vast discomfort or something like it made him puff out his cheeks.
“Sir,” he began in a thunderous voice, which he managed to tone down. “I do not think you need worry unduly about your sister Marion. Unchivalrous as it may sound, I say to you that this young lady is as tough as nails. She will suffer very little harm from the loss of Stephen Curtis. But Fay Seton is another matter.”
The little dining-room was silent. They could hear the rain outside.
“I have told you all her story now,” pursued Dr. Fell, “or nearly all of it. I should say no more, since the matter is none of my business. And yet these past six years cannot have been a very easy time for her.
“She was hounded from Chartres. She was hounded, with a threat of arrest for murder, even in Paris. I am inclined to suspect, since she wouldn't show her French identity papers to Hadley, that she made her living on the streets.
“Yet there was some quality in that girl's nature—call it generosity, call it a sense of fatality, call it anything you like—that would not let her speak out, even at the end, and denounce a person who had once been her friend. She feels that an evil destiny has got her and will never let her go. She has at best only a few months more to live. She lies now in a hospital, sick and dispirited and without hope. What do you think of it all?”
Miles rose to his feet.
“I'm going to her,” he said.
There was a sharp scraping noise on the carpet as Barbara Morell pushed her chair back. Barbara's eyes were opened wide.
“Miles, don't be a fool!”
“I'm going to her.”
Then it all poured out.
“Listen,” said Barbara, resting her hands on the table and speaking quietly but very fast. “You're not in love with her. I knew that when you told me about Pamela Hoyt and the dream you had. She's just the same as Pamela Hoyt; unreal, a dust-image out of old books, a dream you've created in your own mind.
“Listen, Miles! That's what threw the spell over you. You're an idealist and you've never been anything else. Whatever—whatever mad plan you've got in your head, it could only end in disaster even before she died. Miles, for heaven's sake!”
He went over to the chair where he had left his hat.
Barbara Morell—sincere, sympathetic, advising him for his own good as Marion did—let her voice rise to a small scream.
“Miles, it's silly! Think what she is!”
“I don't gibe a curse what she is,” he said. “I'm going to her.”
And once more Miles Hammond went out of the little dining-room at Beltring's, and hurried down the private stairs into the rain.
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He Who Whispers dgf-16 Page 22
