He Who Whispers (10 page)

‘Yes. The peculiar and painful and unheroic form of poisoning you get in the Tank Corps.'

‘Harry Brooke was killed in the retreat to Dunkirk in nineteen-forty,' remarked Fay, with absolutely no change of tone. ‘He joined the French Army as liaison-officer with the British – being bi-lingual, you see – and he was killed in the retreat to Dunkirk.'

During a thunderclap of silence, while Miles's ears seemed to ring and Fay Seton's voice remained exactly the same, he stood staring at her reflexion in the window-glass. Then she added:

‘You know all about me, don't you?'

Miles put down the lamp on the window-sill, because his hand was shaking and he felt a constriction across his chest. He swung round to face her.

‘
Who told you
…?'

‘Your sister intimated it. She said you were moody and had imaginative fits.'

(Marion, eh?)

‘I think it was awfully decent of you, Mr Hammond, to give me this position – and I
am
rather badly off! – without asking me anything about it. They very nearly sent me to the guillotine, you know, for the murder of Harry's father. But don't you think you ought to hear
my
side of it?'

Long pause.

A cool breeze, infinitely healing, crept in through the window-lights and mingled with the fustiness of old books. From the corner of his eye Miles noticed a black strand of cobweb swaying from the ceiling. He cleared his throat.

‘It's none of my business, Miss Seton. And I don't want to upset you.'

‘It doesn't upset me. Really it doesn't.'

‘But don't you feel …?'

‘No. Not now.' She spoke in a very odd tone. The blue eyes, their whites very luminous in lamplight, turned sideways. She put one hand against her breast, a hand very white in contrast to the grey silk dress, and pressed hard there. ‘Self-sacrifice!' she said.

‘I beg your pardon?'

‘What we won't do,' murmured Fay Seton, ‘if we get a chance to sacrifice ourselves!' She was silent for a long time, the wide-spaced blue eyes expressionless and lowered. ‘Forgive me, Mr Hammond. It doesn't really matter, but I wonder who told you about this.'

‘Professor Rigaud.'

‘Oh, Georges Rigaud.' She nodded. ‘I heard he'd escaped from France during the German occupation, and taken a university post in England. I only asked that, you see, because your sister wasn't sure. For some reason she seemed to think the source of your information was Count Cagliostro.'

They both laughed. Miles was glad of an excuse to laugh, glad to relieve his feelings by shouting at the top of his lungs; but the noise of that laughter went up with inexplicable eerieness under the towering walls of books.

‘I – I didn't kill Mr Brooke,' said Fay. ‘Do you believe that?'

‘Yes.'

‘Thank you, Mr Hammond. I …'

(God knows, Miles thought to himself, I,
do
want to hear your story! Go on! Go on! Go on!)

‘I went out to France,' she told him in her low voice, ‘to be Mr Brooke's personal secretary. I wasn't what you might call,' she looked away from him, ‘experienced.'

Miles nodded without speaking, since she had paused.

‘It was awfully pleasant there. The Brookes were pleasant, or so I thought. I … well, you've probably heard that I fell in love with Harry Brooke. I really did fall in love with him, Mr Hammond, from the very start.'

Miles's question, a question he had not meant to ask, was wrung out of him. ‘But you refused Harry the first time he proposed marriage?'

‘Did I? Who told you that?'

‘Professor Rigaud.'

‘Oh, I see.' (What was that strange, secret, inner amusement about her eyes? Or did he imagine it?) ‘In any case, Mr Hammond, we did become engaged. I think I was very happy, because I've always been domestic-minded. We were making plans for the future, when someone began circulating reports about me.'

Miles's throat felt dry.

‘What sort of reports?'

‘Oh, of gross immorality.' Faint colour stained the smooth white cheeks; still she kept her eyelids lowered. ‘And something else which is really,' Fay half laughed, ‘too stupid to bother you with.
I
never heard any of this, of course. But Mr Brooke must have been hearing for some weeks, though he never said anything. First of all I think he had been getting anonymous letters.'

‘Anonymous letters?' exclaimed Miles.

‘Yes.'

‘Professor Rigaud didn't say anything about
that
!'

‘Perhaps not. It's – it's only what I think, of course. Matters were awfully strained at the house: in the study when Mr Brooke was dictating, and at meals, and in the evening. Even Mrs Brooke seemed to guess something had gone wrong. Then we came to that awful day of the twelfth of August, when Mr Brooke died.'

Backing away, never taking his eyes from her, Miles Hammond hauled himself up to sit on the wide ledge of the windows.

The tiny lamp-flames burned clearly; the shadows were steady. But in Miles's imagination this long library might have been swept away. He was again outside Chartres beside the Eure, with its backgrounds as the villa called Beauregard and the stone tower looming above the river. The old scenes took form again.

‘What a hot day it was!' Fay said dreamily, and moved her shoulders. ‘Damp and thundery, but so
hot
! Mr Brooke asked me after breakfast, privately, whether I would meet him at Henri Quatre's tower about four o'clock. Of course I never dreamed he was going in to the Crédit Lyonnais in Chartres to get the famous two thousand pounds.

‘
I
left the house at shortly before three o'clock, just before Mr Brooke returned from the bank with that money in his brief-case. You see, I can tell you … oh, I told the police so often afterwards! … all the times. I meant to go for a dip in the river, so I took along a bathing-suit. But instead I simply wandered along the river-bank.'

Fay paused.

‘When I left that house, Mr Hammond,' – she uttered a strange, far-off kind of laugh – ‘it was outwardly a very peaceful house. Georgina Brooke, that's Harry's mother, was in the kitchen speaking to the cook. Harry was upstairs in his room writing a letter. Harry – poor fellow! – wrote once a week to an old friend of his in England, named Jim Morell.'

Miles sat up.

‘Just a minute, Miss Seton!'

‘Yes?'

And now she did lift her eyes, with a quick blue glance, startled, as though she were suddenly wondering.

‘Was this Jim Morell,' asked Miles, ‘any relation to a girl named Barbara Morell?'

‘Barbara Morell. Barbara Morell.' She repeated it, and the momentary interest died out of her face. ‘No, I can't say I have any knowledge of the girl. Why do you ask?'

‘Because … nothing at all! It doesn't matter.'

Fay Seton smoothed at her skirt, as though earnestly occupied in choosing just what words to say. She seemed to find it a delicate business.

‘I don't know anything about the murder!' she exclaimed, with delicate insistence. ‘Over and over I told the police so afterwards! At just before three o'clock I went for a stroll along the river-bank, northwards, and far beyond the tower.

‘You've undoubtedly heard what was happening in the meantime. Mr Brooke returned from the bank and looked for Harry. Since Harry was by that time in the garage instead of his room, Mr Brooke walked slowly out of the house to keep his appointment with me – miles ahead of time, really! – at the tower. Shortly afterwards Harry learned where he had gone, and snatched up his raincoat and followed Mr Brooke. Mrs Brooke phoned to Georges Rigaud, who drove out there in his car.

‘At half-past three … I knew that by my wrist-watch … I thought it was time for me to stroll back towards the tower, and I went inside. I heard voices talking from the direction of the roof. As I started up the stairs I recognized the voices of Harry and his father.'

Fay moistened her lips.

To Miles it seemed, by the subtle alteration in her tone, that she used by force of habit – sincerely, yet glibly – a series of words made familiar to her by repetition.

‘No, I did not hear what they were talking about. It is simply that I dislike unpleasantness, and I would not remain. In going out of the tower I met Monsieur Rigaud, who was going in. Afterwards … well! I went for my dip after all.'

Miles stared at her.

‘For a swim in the river?'

‘I felt hot and tired. I believed it would cool me. I undressed in the woods by the river, as many persons do. This was not near the tower; it was well away from the tower, northwards, on the west bank. I swam and floated and dreamed in the cool water. I did not know anything was wrong until I was walking back home at a quarter to five. There was a great clamour of people round the tower, with policemen among them. And Harry walked up to me, putting out his hands, and said, “My God, Fay, somebody's killed Dad.”'

Her voice trailed away.

Putting up a hand to shade her eyes, Fay shielded her face well. When she looked at Miles again, it was with a wistful and apologetic smile.

‘Please do forgive me!' she said, giving her head that little sideways toss which made the dim yellow light ripple across her hair. ‘I
lived
it again, you see. It's a habit lonely people have.'

‘Yes. I know.'

‘And that's the limit of my knowledge, really. Is there anything you want to ask me?'

Acutely uncomfortable, Miles spread out his hands. ‘My dear Miss Seton! I'm not here to question you like a public prosecutor!'

‘Perhaps not. But I'd rather you did, if you have any doubts.'

Miles hesitated.

‘The only thing the police really could urge against me,' she said, ‘was that most unfortunate swim of mine. I had been in the river. And there were no witnesses who could testify about the part of the tower facing the river: who went near it, or who didn't. Of course it was perfectly absurd that someone – in a bathing-dress: really! – could get up a smooth wall forty feet high. They were compelled to see that, eventually. But in the meantime …!'

Smiling as though the matter were of no importance now, yet shivering a little nevertheless, Fay rose to her feet. She edged forward among the waist-high piles of books, as though impulsively, before changing her mind. Her head was still a little on one side. About her eyes and her mouth there was a passive gentleness, a sweetness, which went straight to Miles's heart. He jumped down from the edge of the window-sill.

‘You do believe me?' cried Fay. ‘Say you believe me!'

M
ILES
smiled at her.

‘Of course I' believe you!'

‘Thank you, Mr Hammond. Only I thought you looked a little doubtful, a little – what shall I call it?'

‘It isn't that. It's only that Professor Rigaud's account was more or less cut off in the middle, and there were certain things that kept tormenting me. What was the official police view of the whole matter?'

‘They finally decided it was suicide.'

‘
Suicide
?'

‘Yes.'

‘But why?'

‘I suppose, really,' and Fay lifted her thin-arched eyebrows in a timidly whimsical way, ‘it was because they couldn't find any other explanation. That verdict saved their faces.' She hesitated. ‘And it's true that Mr Brooke's fingerprints, and only Mr Brooke's fingerprints, were on the handle of the sword-stick. You heard it was a sword-stick?'

‘Oh, yes. I even saw the infernal thing.'

‘The police surgeon, a nice funny little man named Doctor Pommard, almost had a fit whenever he thought of the verdict. He gave some technicalities, which I'm afraid I don't understand, to show that the angle of the wound was very nearly impossible for a suicide: certainly impossible unless Mr Brooke had held the weapon by the blade instead of by the handle. All the same …' She lifted her shoulders.

‘But wait a minute!' protested Miles. ‘As I understand it, the brief-case with the money was missing?'

‘Yes. That's true.'

‘If nobody got up on top of the tower to stab Mr Brooke, what did they think had happened to the brief-case?'

Fay looked away from him.

‘They thought,' she replied, ‘that in Mr Brooke's dying convulsion he – he had somehow knocked it off the parapet into the river.'

‘Did they drag the river?'

‘Yes. Immediately.'

‘And they didn't find it?'

‘Not then … or ever.'

Fay's head was bent forward, her eyes on the floor.

‘And it wasn't for want of trying!' she cried out softly. The tips of her fingers brushed across books and left streaks in the dust. ‘That affair was the sensation of France during the first winter of the war. Poor Mrs Brooke died during that winter; they say she died of grief. Harry, as I told you, was killed in the retreat to Dunkirk.

‘Then the Germans came. They were always glad of any excuse to give publicity to a sensational murder case, especially one that had – that had a woman's immorality concerned in it, because they believed it kept the French public amused and out of mischief. Oh,
they
saw to it that popular curiosity didn't lapse!'

‘I gather,' said Miles, ‘that you were caught in the invasion? You didn't come back to England before then?'

‘No,' answered Fay. ‘I was ashamed'

Miles turned away from her, turned his back to her, and fiercely struck his fist on the window-sill.

‘We've talked about this long enough,' he declared.

‘Please! It's perfectly all right.'

‘It's
not
all right!' Miles stared grimly out of the window. ‘I hereby give you my solemn promise that this subject is finished; that I will never refer to it again; that I will never ask you another ques –' He stopped. ‘You didn't marry Harry Brooke, then?'