He Who Whispers

by John Dickson Carr

  ‘No! I’d never set eyes on her before in my life!’

  ‘Then how do you know it was Fay Seton?’

  ‘From the photograph. The coloured photograph Professor Rigaud showed us on Friday night. After all, I … I thought she was with you. And so I wasn’t going to keep the appointment. Or at least – I didn’t quite know. What’s wrong?’

  This was disaster fine and full.

  He wasn’t mad, Miles told himself; and he wasn’t drunk, and he wasn’t blind; and he could take his oath Fay Seton had not been aboard that train. Fantastic images occurred to him, of a white face and a red mouth. These images were exotic plants which withered in the atmosphere of Waterloo Station, certainly in the atmosphere of the train he had just left.

  Yet he looked down at Barbara’s fair hair and grey eyes; he thought of her normalness – that was it! a lovable normalness – in this murky affair; and at the same time he thought of all that had happened since he saw her last.

  Marion was lying in a stupor at Greywood, and not from the effects of poison or a knife. Dr Fell had spoken of an evil spirit. These things were not fancies; they were facts. Miles remembered his impression of that morning: here’s a malignant force, and Dr Fell knows what it is; we’ll kill it, or it will kill us; and, in sober God’s truth, the game had begun now.

  All this went through his head in the split-second of Barbara’s remark.

  ‘You saw Fay Seton come through the gates,’ he said. ‘In which direction did she go?’

  ‘I couldn’t tell. There are too many people.’

  ‘Wait a minute! We’re not beaten yet! Professor Rigaud told me last night … yes, he’s at Greywood too! … that you phoned him yesterday, and that you knew Fay’s address. She’s got a room in town somewhere, and according to Dr Fell she’ll go straight to it. Do you know the address?’

  ‘Yes!’ Barbara, in a tailored suit and white blouse, with a mackintosh draped over her shoulders and an umbrella hung across her arm, fumblingly opened her handbag and took out an address-book. ‘This is it. Five Bolsover Place, NWI. But …!’

  ‘Where’s Bolsover Place?’

  ‘Well, Bolsover Street is off Camden High Street in Camden Town. I – I looked it up when I wondered whether I ought to go and see her. It’s rather a dingy neighbourhood, but I imagine she’s even more hard up than the rest of us.’

  ‘What’s her quickest way to get there?’

  ‘By Underground, easily. You can go straight through from here without a change.’

  ‘Then that’s what she’s done, you can bet a fiver! She can’t be two minutes ahead of us! Probably we can catch her! Come on!’

  Give me some luck! he was praying under his breath. Give me just one proper hand to play, one card higher than a deuce or a three! And not long afterwards, when they burst out of a ticket-queue and penetrated down into the airless depths where a maze of lines join, he got his card.

  Miles heard the rumble of the approaching train as they emerged on the platform of the Northern Line. They were at one end of the platform, and people straggled for more than a hundred yards along its curve. Vision was blurred in this half-cylinder cavern, once brave with white tiling, now sordid and ill-lighted.

  The red train swept out of its tunnel in a gale of wind, and streamed past to a stop. And he saw Fay Seton.

  He saw her by the bright flash of windows now unscaled from blast-netting. She was standing at the extreme other end of the platform, the front of the train; and she moved forward as the doors rolled open.

  ‘Fay!’ he yelled. ‘Fay!’

  It went completely unheard.

  ‘Edgware train!’ the guard was bellowing. ‘Edgware train!’

  ‘Don’t try to run up there!’ warned Barbara. ‘The doors will close and we’ll lose her altogether. Hadn’t we better go in here?’

  They dived into the rear car of the train, a non-smoker, just before the doors did close. Its only other occupants were a policeman, a somnolent-looking Australian soldier, and the guard at his panel of control-buttons. Miles had got only a faint glimpse of Fay’s face; but it had looked fierce, preoccupied, with that same curious smile of last night.

  It was maddening to be so close to her, and yet …

  ‘If I can get through to the front of the train –!’

  ‘Please!’ urged Barbara. She indicated the sign, ‘Do Not Pass From One Car To Another Whilst the Train is In Motion’; she indicated the guard, and she indicated the policeman. ‘It wouldn’t do much good, would it, if you got yourself arrested now?’

  ‘No, I suppose not.’

  ‘She’ll get out at Camden Town. So will we. Sit down here.’

  In their ears was a soft, streaming thunder as the train rocketed through the tunnel. The car swayed and creaked round a curve; lights behind opaque glass jolted on the upholstery of the seats. Miles, all his nerves twitching with doubt, sank down beside Barbara on a double-seat facing forward.

  ‘I don’t like to ask too many questions,’ continued Barbara, ‘but I’ve been half mad with curiosity ever since I talked to you on the phone. What is all the urgency about overtaking Fay Seton?’

  The train ground to a stop, and the sliding doors rolled open.

  ‘Charing Cross!’ yelled the guard conscientiously. ‘Edgware train!’

  Miles sprang to his feet.

  ‘Really it’s all right,’ Barbara pleaded. ‘If Dr Fell says she’s going to that place of hers, she’s bound to get out at Camden Town. What can happen in the meantime?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ admitted Miles. ‘Look here,’ he added, sitting down again and taking her hand in both of his. ‘I’ve known you only a very short time; but do you mind me saying I’d rather talk to you now than almost anyone else I can think of?’

  ‘No,’ answered Barbara, looking away from him, ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘I can’t say how you’ve been spending the week-end,’ pursued Miles, ‘but we’ve been having nothing but a Grand Guignol of vampires and near-murders, and …’

  ‘What did you Say?’ She drew back her hand quickly.

  ‘Yes! And Dr Fell claims you may be able to supply one of the most important pieces of information, whatever that is.’ He paused. ‘Who is Jim Morell?’

  Clank-thud went the rush of the train, hollow-streaming through its tunnel; a breeze touched their hair from the ventilator-windows.

  ‘You can’t connect him with this,’ said Barbara, and her fingers tightened round her handbag. ‘He doesn’t know, he never did know, anything about the death of Mr Brooke! He …’

  ‘Yes! But do you mind telling me who he is?’

  ‘He’s my brother.’ Barbara moistened her very smooth, pink lips; not as attractive, perhaps, not as heady, as those of the passive blue-eyed woman now in the first car of the train. Miles shook this thought out of his mind as Barbara asked quickly: ‘Where did you hear about him?’

  ‘From Fay Seton.’

  ‘Oh?’ She started a little.

  ‘I’ll tell you the whole story in just a minute. But there are certain things to straighten out first. Your brother … where is he now?’

  ‘He’s in Canada. For three years he was a prisoner of war in Germany, and we thought he was dead. He’s been sent out to Canada for his health. Jim’s older than I am; he was quite a well-known painter, before the war.’

  ‘And I understand he was a friend of Harry Brooke.’

  ‘Yes.’ Then Barbara spoke, softly but very clearly. ‘He was a friend of that utterly unspeakable swine Harry Brooke.’

  ‘Strand!’ shouted out the guard. ‘Edgware train!’

  Subconsciously Miles was listening hard for that voice; listening for every slowing-down of the rumbling wheels, every sigh and jolt as the doors rolled open. The one thing he mustn’t miss, on his soul’s life, were those words, ‘Camden Town’.

  But – utterly unspeakable swine? Harry Brooke?

  ‘There’s just one thing,’ continued Miles, with discomfort stirring thro
ugh him but with a fierce determination to face it. ‘I’d better mention before I tell you what happened. And that’s this:

  ‘I believe in Fay Seton. I’ve got into trouble with practically everyone for saying that: with my sister Marion, with Steve Curtis, with Professor Rigaud, even perhaps with Dr Fell, though I’m not quite so sure where he stands. And, since you were the first person who warned me against her …’

  ‘I warned you against her?’

  ‘Yes. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Oh!’ breathed Barbara Morell.

  She had drawn back a little from him, with the dark cylinder-curved walls flying past outside the windows. She breathed that monosyllable in a tone of utter stupefaction, as though she could not believe her ears.

  Miles had an instinct that the whole situation was going to change again; that something was not only wrong, but deadly wrong. Barbara stared at him, her mouth open. He saw comprehension come into the grey eyes, slow incredulous comprehension as they searched his face; then half-laughter, a wild helpless gesture …

  ‘You thought,’ she insisted, ‘that I –?’

  ‘Yes! Didn’t you?’

  ‘Listen.’ Barbara put her hand on his arm, and spoke with clear-eyed sincerity. ‘I wasn’t trying to warn you against her. I was wondering if you could help her. Fay Seton is …’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Fay Seton is one of the most completely wronged, bedevilled, and – and hurt persons I’ve ever heard of. All I was trying to find out was whether she might have committed the murder, because I didn’t know any details about the murder. She’d have been justified, you know, if she had killed someone! But you could tell, from what Professor Rigaud said, she hadn’t done that, either. And I was at my wits’ end.’

  Barbara made a short, slight gesture.

  ‘If you remember, at Beltring’s, I wasn’t even so much as interested in anything except the murder. The things that went before it, the charges of immorality and – and the other ridiculous thing that almost got her stoned by the country people, didn’t matter. Because they were a deliberate, cruel frame-up against her from start to finish.’

  Barbara’s voice rose.

  ‘I knew that. I can prove it. I’ve got a whole packet of letters to prove it. That woman’s been in hell from lying gossip that prejudiced her in the eyes of the police, and may have ruined her life. I could have helped her. I can help her. But I’m too much of a coward! I’m too much of a coward! I’m too much of a coward!’

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘LEICESTER SQUARE!’ sang the guard.

  One or two persons got in. But the long, hot Underground car was still almost empty. The Australian soldier snored. A button tinkled, in communication with the driver far away at the front; the doors rolled shut. It was still a good distance to Camden Town.

  Miles didn’t notice. He was again in the upstairs room at Beltring’s Restaurant, watching Barbara Morell as she faced Professor Rigaud across the dinner-table: watching the expression of her eyes, hearing that curious exclamation under her breath – incredulity or contempt – dismissing as of no importance the statement that Howard Brooke had cursed Fay Seton aloud in the Crédit Lyonnais Bank.

  Miles was fitting every word, every gesture, into a pattern that hitherto had baffled him.

  ‘Professor Rigaud,’ continued Barbara, ‘is very observant at seeing and describing the outside of things. But he never once realizes, he really doesn’t, what’s inside. I could have wept when he said jokingly that he was a blind bat and owl. Because in a sense that’s perfectly true.

  ‘For a whole summer Professor Rigaud stood at Harry Brooke’s shoulder. He preached at Harry; he moulded him, he influenced him. Yet he never guessed the truth. Harry, for all his athletic skill and his good looks – and,’ said Barbara with contempt, ‘they must have been rather pretty-boy good looks – was simply a cold-hearted fish determined to get his own way.’

  (Cold-hearted. Cold-hearted. Where had Miles heard that same term before?)

  Barbara bit her lip.

  ‘You remember,’ she said, ‘that Harry’s heart was set on becoming a painter?’

  ‘Yes. I remember.’

  ‘And he would argue with his parents about it? And then, as Professor Rigaud described it, he would hit a tennis-ball like a streak or go out on the lawn and sit with a “white-faced brooding swearing look”?’

  ‘I remember that too.’

  ‘Harry knew it was the one thing on earth his parents would never consent to. They really did idolize him, but just because they idolized him they’d never consent. And he wasn’t – wasn’t man enough to leave a lot of money and strike out for himself. I’m sorry to talk like this,’ Barbara added helplessly, ‘but it’s true. So Harry, long before Fay Seton came there, set about scheming in his horrible little mind for a way to compel them to consent.

  ‘Then Fay arrived there to be his father’s secretary, and he did see a way at last.

  ‘I – I’ve never met the woman,’ Barbara confessed broodingly. ‘I can only judge her through letters. I may be all wrong. But I see her as passive and good-natured; really inexperienced; a bit of a romantic, and without much sense of humour.

  ‘And Harry Brooke thought of a way. First he would pretend to fall in love with Fay …’

  ‘Pretend to fall in love with her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Dimly Miles began to see the design take form. And yet it was inevitable. As inevitable as …

  ‘Tottenham Court Road!’

  ‘Stop a bit,’ Miles muttered. ‘The old proverb says that there are two things which will be believed about any man, and one of them is that he has taken to drink. We might add that there are two things which will be believed about any woman, and both of them are …’

  ‘Both of them,’ admitted Barbara, ‘are that she has a horribly bad character’ – the colour went up in her face – ‘and probably carries on with every man in the district. The more quiet and unobtrusive she is, especially if she won’t look you straight in the eye or enthuse over a lot of silly games like golf or tennis, then the more people are convinced there must be something in it.

  ‘Harry’s scheme was as cold-blooded as that. He would write his father a lot of vilely phrased anonymous letters about her …’

  ‘Anonymous letters!’ said Miles.

  ‘He would start a whispering campaign against her, connecting her name with Jean This and Jacques That. His parents – they weren’t too keen already about his marrying anyone – would get alarmed at the scandal and beg him to break it off.

  He’d already prepared the way by inventing a story, absolutely false, that she’d refused him the first time he proposed marriage with the hint that there was some terrible secret reason why she couldn’t marry him. He told that tale to Professor Rigaud, and poor old Professor Rigaud retailed it to us. Do you recall that?’

  Miles nodded.

  ‘I also recall,’ he said, that when I mentioned the same story to her last night, she …’

  ‘She – what?’

  ‘Never mind! Go on!’

  ‘So the scandal would gather, and Harry’s parents would beg him to break off the marriage. Harry would only look noble and refuse. The more he refused, the more frantic they would be. Finally he would be crushed, practically in tears, and he would say: “All right, I’ll give her up. But if I do consent to give her up, will you send me to Paris for two years to study painting so that I can forget her?” ’

  ‘Would they have agreed then? Don’t we all know what families are? Of course they would have! They’d have seized at it in blessed relief.

  ‘Only,’ added Barbara, ‘Harry’s little plan didn’t work out quite like that, you see.

  ‘The anonymous letters horribly worried his father, who wouldn’t even so much as mention them to his mother. But Harry’s whispering campaign in the district almost failed completely. You know that French shrug of the shoulder, and the “Et alors?” which just about corresponds to, “So w
hat?” They were busy people; they had crops to harvest; such things harmed no one if they didn’t interfere with work; so what?’

  Barbara began to laugh hysterically, but she checked herself.

  ‘It was Professor Rigaud, always preaching to Harry about crime and the occult – he told us so himself – who in all innocence put Harry on to the thing these people really did fear. The thing that would make them talk and even scream. It’s silly and it’s horrible and of course it worked straight away. Harry deliberately bribed that sixteen-year-old boy to counterfeit marks in his own throat and start a story about a vampire …

  ‘You do see now, don’t you?’

  ‘Goodge Street!’

  ‘Harry knew, of course, that his father wouldn’t believe any nonsense about vampires. Harry didn’t want his father to believe that. What Mr Brooke would hear, what he couldn’t help hearing in every corner round Chartres, was a story about his son’s fiancée visiting Pierre Fresnac so often at night, and … and all the rest of it. That would be enough. That would be more than enough.’

  Miles Hammond shivered.

  Clank-thud went the train, roaring on in its fusty tunnel. Lights jolted on metal and upholstery. In Barbara’s story Miles could see tragedy coming as clearly as though he did not already know of its existence.

  ‘I don’t question what you tell me,’ he said, and he took a key-ring out of his pocket and twisted it fiercely as though he wanted to tear it in two. ‘But how do you know these details?’

  ‘Harry wrote them all to my brother!’ cried Barbara.

  She was silent for a moment.

  ‘Jim’s a painter, you see. Harry admired him tremendously. Harry thought – honestly thought! – that Jim as a man of the world would approve of his scheme to get away from a stuffy family atmosphere and call him no end of a clever fellow for thinking this up.’

  ‘Did you know all about it at the time?’

  Barbara opened her eyes wide.

  ‘Good heavens, no! That was six years ago. I was only twenty at the time. I remember Jim did keep getting letters from France that worried him, but he never made any remark about it. Then …’