He Who Whispers

by John Dickson Carr

  The doctor rolled up his head.

  ‘Eh? Yes? What is it?’

  ‘I suppose Superintendent Hadley’s told you what happened in this room a couple of hours ago?’

  ‘H’mf, yes. He’s told me.’

  ‘Barbara and I came in here and found Fay standing where Barbara is now, with the brief-case and a bundle of bloodstained banknotes. I – er – shoved those notes into my pocket just before Hadley arrived. I needn’t have bothered. After asking a lot of questions which seemed to tend towards Fay’s guilt, he showed he knew about the brief-case all along.’

  Dr Fell frowned. ‘Well?’

  ‘At the height of the questioning, this light went out. Somebody must have thrown the main-switch in the fuse-box just outside in the passage. Someone or something rushed in here …’

  ‘Someone,’ repeated Dr Fell, ‘or something. By thunder, I like the choice of words!’

  ‘Whoever it was, it threw Fay to one side and ran out of here with the brief-case. We didn’t see anything. I picked up the brief-case outside a minute later. It had nothing in it but the three other packets of notes and a little gritty dust. Hadley took the whole lot away with him, including my concealed notes, when he left with Fay in the – in the ambulance.’

  Miles gritted his teeth.

  ‘I mention all this,’ he went on, ‘because so many hints have been made about her guilt that I’d like to see justice done in one respect. Whatever reason you had for asking me, Dr Fell, you did ask me to get in touch with Barbara Morell. And I did, with sensational results.’

  ‘Ah!’ murmured Dr Fell in a vaguely distressed way. He would not meet Miles’s eye.

  ‘Did you know, for instance, that it was Harry Brooke who wrote a series of anonymous letters accusing Fay of having affairs with men all over the district? And then, when that charge fell flat, Harry stirred up superstition by bribing young Fresnac to slash marks in his own neck and start this nonsense about vampirism? Did you know that?’

  ‘Yes,’ assented Dr Fell. ‘I know it. It’s true enough.’

  ‘We have here’ – Miles gestured to Barbara, who opened her handbag – ‘a letter written by Harry Brooke on the very afternoon of the murder. He wrote it to Barbara’s brother, who,’ Miles added hastily, ‘isn’t at all concerned in this. If you still have any doubts …’

  Dr Fell reared up his shoulders with sudden acute interest.

  ‘You have that letter?’ he demanded. ‘May I see it?’

  ‘With pleasure. Barbara?’

  Rather reluctantly, Miles thought, Barbara handed over the letter. Dr Fell took it, adjusted his eyeglasses, and slowly read it through. His expression had grown even more lowering when he put it down on one knee on top of the manuscript and the photograph.

  ‘It’s a pretty story, isn’t it?’ Miles asked bitterly. ‘A very fine thing to hound her with! But let’s leave Harry’s ethics out of this, if nobody gives a curse about Fay’s side of it. The point is, this whole situation came about through a trick played by Harry Brooke …’

  ‘No!’ said Dr Fell, in a voice like a pistol-shot.

  Miles stared at him.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’ Miles demanded. ‘You’re not saying that Pierre Fresnac and this grotesque charge of vampirism – ?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Dr Fell, shaking his head. ‘We may leave young Fresnac and the manufactured teeth-marks entirely out of the picture. They are irrelevant. They don’t count. But …’

  ‘But what?’

  Dr Fell, after contemplating the floor, slowly raised his head and looked Miles in the eyes.

  ‘Harry Brooke,’ he said, ‘wrote a lot of anonymous letters containing accusations in which he didn’t believe. That is the irony! That is the tragedy! For, although Harry Brooke didn’t know it – didn’t dream of it, wouldn’t have believed it if you’d told him – the accusations were nevertheless perfectly true.’

  Silence.

  A silence which stretched out unendurably …

  Barbara Morell put her hand softly on Miles’s arm. It seemed to Miles that between Dr Fell and Barbara flashed a glance of understanding. But he wanted time to assimilate the meaning of those words.

  ‘Behold now,’ said Dr Fell, rounding the syllables with thunderous emphasis, ‘an explanation which presently will fit so many puzzling factors in this affair. Fay Seton had to have men. I wish to put this matter with delicacy, so I will merely refer you to the psychologists. But it is a form of psychic illness which has tortured her since youth.

  ‘She is no more to be blamed for it than for the heart-weakness which accompanied it. In women so constituted – there are not a great number of them, but they do appear in consulting-rooms – the result does not always end in actual disaster. But Fay Seton (don’t you see?) was emotionally the wrong kind of woman to have this quirk in her nature. Her outward Puritanism, her fastidiousness, her delicacy, her gentle manners, were not assumed. They are real. To have relations with casual strangers was and is torture to her.

  ‘When she went out to France as Howard Brooke’s secretary in nineteen-thirty-nine, she was resolved to conquer this. She would: she would, she would! Her behaviour at Chartres was irreproachable. And then …’

  Dr Fell paused.

  Again he took up the photograph and studied it.

  ‘Do you begin to understand now? The atmosphere which always surrounded her was an air of … well, look into your own memory! It went with her. It haunted her. It clung round her. That was the quality which touched and troubled everywhere the people with whom she came in contact, even though they did not understand it. It was a quality sensed by nearly all men. It was a quality sensed, and bitterly resented, by nearly all women.

  ‘Think of Georgina Brooke! Think of Marion Hammond! Think of …’ Dr Fell broke off, and blinked at Barbara. ‘I believe you met her a while ago, ma’am?’

  Barbara made a helpless gesture.

  ‘I only met Fay for a very few minutes!’ she protested quickly. ‘How on earth could I tell anything? Of course not! I …’

  ‘Will you think again, ma’am?’ said Dr Fell gently.

  ‘Besides,’ said Barbara, ‘I liked her!’

  And Barbara turned away.

  Dr Fell tapped the photograph. The pictured eyes – with their faint irony, their bitterness under the far-away expression – made Fay Seton’s presence live and move in this room as strongly as the discarded handbag still on the chest of drawers, or the fallen identity card, or the black beret on the bed.

  ‘That is the figure, good-natured and well-meaning, we must see walking in bewilderment – or apparent bewilderment – through the events that follow.’ Dr Fell’s big voice was raised. ‘Two crimes were committed. Both of them were the work of the same criminal …’

  ‘The same criminal?’ cried Barbara.

  And Dr Fell nodded.

  ‘The first,’ he said, ‘was unpremeditated and slap-dash; it became a miracle in spite of itself. The second was planned and careful, bringing a bit of the dark world into our lives. Shall I continue?’

  CHAPTER 19

  ABSENTLY Dr Fell was filling his meerschaum pipe as he spoke, the manuscript and the photograph and the letter still on his knee, and his eye fixed drowsily on a corner of the ceiling.

  ‘I should like, with your permission, to take you back to Chartres on the fateful twelfth of August when Howard Brooke was murdered.

  ‘Now I am no orator, as Rigaud is. He could describe for you, in stabbing little phrases clustered together, the house called Beauregard, and the winding river, and Henri Quatre’s tower looming over the trees, and the hot thundery day when it wouldn’t quite rain. In fact, he has done so.’ Dr Fell tapped the manuscript. ‘But I want you to understand that little group of people at Beauregard.

  Archons of Athens! It couldn’t have been worse.

  ‘Fay Seton had become engaged to Harry Brooke. She had really fallen in love – or had convinced herself she had – with a callow, coldhear
ted young man who had nothing to recommend him except his youth and his good looks. Do you remember that scene, described by Harry to Rigaud, in which Harry proposes marriage and is at first rejected?’

  Again Barbara protested.

  ‘But that incident,’ she cried, ‘wasn’t true! never happened!’

  ‘Oh, ah,’ agreed Dr Fell, nodding with some violence. ‘It never happened. The point being that it might well have happened in every detail. Fay Seton must have known, in her heart of hearts, that with all her good intentions she couldn’t marry anybody unless she wanted to wreck the marriage in three months by her … well, let it pass.

  ‘But this time – no! This time is different. We have changed all that. This time she is really in love, romantically as well as physically, and it will work out. After all, nobody has been able to say a word against her since she has come to France as Mr Brooke’s secretary.

  ‘And all this time Harry Brooke – never seeing anything, drawing on what Harry thinks is his imagination – had been driving his father to distraction with anonymous letters against Fay. Harry’s only concern was to get his own way; to get to Paris and study painting. What did he care for a rather silent, passive girl, who tended to draw away from his embraces and remained half cold when he kissed her? Thunderation, no! Give him somebody with a bit of life!

  ‘Irony? I rather think so.

  ‘And then the figurative storm burst. On the twelfth of August, somebody stabbed Mr Brooke. Let me show you how.’

  Miles Hammond turned round abruptly.

  Miles walked over and sat down beside Professor Rigaud on the edge of the bed. Neither of these two, though for different reasons, had spoken a word for some time.

  ‘Yesterday morning,’ pursued Dr Fell, putting down his filled pipe to pick up the sheaf of manuscript and weigh it in his hand, ‘my friend Georges Rigaud brought me this account of the case. If I quote from it at any time, you two others will perhaps recognize that Rigaud used exactly the same words when telling it to you verbally.

  ‘He also showed me a certain sword-stick of evil memory.’ Dr Fell blinked across at Professor Rigaud. ‘Have you – harrumph – by any chance got the same weapon here now?’

  With an angry, half-frightened gesture Professor Rigaud picked up the sword-cane and flung it across the room. Dr Fell caught it neatly. But Barbara, as though it had been an attack, backed away against the closed door.

  ‘Ah, zut!’ cried Professor Rigaud, and shook his arms in the air.

  ‘You doubt my remarks, sir?’ inquired Dr Fell. ‘You did not doubt when I gave you a very short sketch earlier to-day.’

  ‘No, no, no!’ said Professor Rigaud. ‘What you say about this woman Fay Seton is right, is absolutely right. I claim a point when I said to you that the characteristics of the vampire are also in folklore the characteristics of eroticism. But I kick me the pants because I, the old cynic, do not see all this for myself!’

  ‘Sir,’ returned Dr Fell, ‘you acknowledge yourself that you are not much interested in material clues. That is why, even when you were writing about it, you failed to observe …’

  ‘Observe what?’ said Barbara. ‘Dr Fell, who killed Mr Brooke?’

  Outside there was a distant crash of thunder, which made the window-frames vibrate and startled them all. The rain, in this wet June, was going to return.

  ‘Let me,’ said Dr Fell, ‘simply outline to you the events of that afternoon. You will see for yourselves, when you dovetail the story of Professor Rigaud with the story of Fay Seton herself, what deductions are to be drawn from them.

  ‘Mr Howard Brooke returned to Beauregard from the Crédit Lyonnais bank about three o’clock, carrying the brief-case with the money. The events of the murder properly begin then, and we can follow them from there. Where were the other members of the household at this time?

  ‘At just before three o’clock Fay Seton left the house, carrying bathing-dress and towel, to go for a walk northwards along the river bank. Mrs Brooke was in the kitchen, speaking to the cook. Harry Brooke was – or had been – upstairs in his own room, writing a letter. We know now that it was this letter.’

  Dr Fell held up the letter.

  With a significant grimace he continued:

  ‘Mr Brooke, then, returned at three and asked for Harry. Mrs Brooke replied that Harry was upstairs in his own room. Harry in the meantime, believing his father would be at the office (as Rigaud did too; see testimony) and never dreaming he might be on his way home, had left the letter unfinished and gone to the garage.

  ‘Mr Brooke went up to Harry’s room, and presently came down again. Now we see – just here! – the curious change in Howard Brooke’s behaviour. He wasn’t frantically angry then, as he had been before. Listen, from the evidence, to his wife’s description of his manner as he came down the stairs: “So pitiful he looked, and so aged, and walking slowly as though he were ill.”

  ‘What had he found, up there in Harry’s room?

  ‘I will anticipate the evidence and tell you.

  ‘On Harry’s desk he saw an unfinished letter. He glanced at it; he glanced at it again, startled; he picked it up and read it through. And his whole honest, comfortable universe crashed down in ruins.

  ‘Carefully outlined, in closely written pages to Jim Morell, was a résumé of Harry’s whole scheme to blacken Fay Seton. The anonymous letters; the discreditable rumours; the vampire hoax. And all this was written down by his son Harry – his absolute idol, that hearty innocent – so that the father should be filthily tricked into giving Harry his own way.

  ‘Do you wonder that it struck him dumb? Do you wonder that he looked like that as he walked downstairs, and slowly – how very slowly! – out along the river-bank towards the tower? He had made an appointment with Fay Seton for four o’clock. He was going to keep that appointment. But I see Howard Brooke as a thoroughly honest man, a straight-forward man who would loathe this worse than anything Harry could have done. He would meet Fay Seton at the tower, all right. But he was going there to apologize.’

  Dr Fell paused.

  Barbara shivered. She glanced at Miles, who sat in a kind of trance, and checked herself from speaking.

  ‘Let us return, however,’ pursued Dr Fell, ‘to the known facts. Mr Brooke, in the tweed cap and raincoat he had been wearing at the Crédit Lyonnais, went towards the tower. Five minutes later, who turned up? Harry, by thunder! – hearing that his father had been there, and asking where he was now. Mrs Brooke told him. Harry stood for a moment “thinking to himself, muttering”. Then he followed his father.’

  Here Dr Fell bent forward with great earnestness.

  ‘Now for a point which isn’t mentioned by Rigaud or in the official records. It isn’t mentioned because nobody bothered with it. Nobody thought it was important. The only person who has mentioned it is Fay Seton, though she wasn’t there when it happened and couldn’t have known it at all unless she had special reason for knowing.

  ‘But this is what she told Miles Hammond last night. She said that, when Harry Brooke left the house in pursuit of Mr Brooke, Harry Brooke snatched up his raincoat.’

  Dr Fell glanced over at Miles.

  ‘You remember that, my boy?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miles, conquering a shaky throat. ‘But why shouldn’t Harry have taken a raincoat? After all, it was a drizzling day!’

  Dr Fell waved him to silence.

  ‘Professor Rigaud,’ Dr Fell continued, ‘followed both father and son to the tower some considerable time afterwards. At the door of the tower, unexpectedly, he met Fay Seton.

  ‘The girl told him that Harry and Mr Brooke were upstairs on top of the tower, having an argument. She declared she hadn’t heard a word of what father and son were saying; but her eyes, testifies Rigaud, were the eyes of one who remembers a horrible experience. She said she wouldn’t interrupt at that moment, and in a frantic state of agitation she ran away.

  ‘On top of the tower Rigaud found Harry and his father, also ve
ry agitated. Both were pale and worked up. Harry seemed to be pleading, while his father demanded to be allowed to attend to “this situation” – whatever it was – in his own way, and harshly told Rigaud to take Harry away.

  ‘At this time Harry certainly wore no raincoat; he was hatless and coatless, in a corduroy suit described by Rigaud. The sword-stick, untouched with blade screwed into sheath, rested against the parapet. So did the brief-case, but for some reason it had become a bulging brief-case.

  ‘That extraordinary word struck me when I first read the manuscript.

  ‘Bulging!

  ‘Now the brief-case certainly hadn’t been like that when Howard Brooke showed its contents to Rigaud at the Crédit Lyonnais. Inside, “in solitary state” – I quote Rigaud’s own words – were four slender packets of banknotes. Nothing else! But now, when Rigaud and Harry left Mr Brooke alone on the tower, there was something stuffed away inside it …

  ‘Look here!’ added Dr Fell.

  And he held up the yellow sword-cane.

  Treating it with extraordinary care, he unscrewed the handle, took the thin blade from the hollow stick, and held it up.

  ‘This weapon,’ he said, ‘was found after the murder of Mr Brooke lying in two halves: the blade near the victim’s foot, the sheath rolled away against the parapet. The two halves were not joined together until long afterwards, days after the murder. The police took them away, for expert examination, just as they were found.

  ‘In other words,’ explained Dr Fell with thunderous fierceness, ‘they were not joined together until long after the blood had dried. Yet there are stains of blood inside the scabbard. O tempora! O mores! Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

  Raising his eyebrows in hideous pantomime, Dr Fell peered round at his companions as though urging them on.

  ‘I’ve got a horrible half-idea I do know what you mean!’ cried Barbara. ‘But I – I don’t quite see it yet. All I can think of is …’

  ‘Is what?’ asked Dr Fell.

  ‘Is Mr Brooke,’ said Barbara. ‘Walking out of the house after he’d read Harry’s letter. Walking slowly towards the tower. Trying to realize what his son had done. Trying to make up his mind what to do.’