He Who Whispers (14 page)

Miles was not listening.

He loved Marion, really loved her in that thoughtless way we feel towards those we have known for twenty-eight out of our thirty-five years. He thought of Marion, and he thought of Steve Curtis.

‘What follows,' said Professor Rigaud, ‘is collapse and death. In severe cases …' Then an almost frightful change came over his face, making the patch of moustache stand out. ‘Ah, God!' he shouted, with a cry which was no less heartfelt for being accompanied by a melodramatic gesture. ‘I forgot! I forgot! I forgot!'

Miles stared at him

‘This lady,' said Professor Rigaud, ‘may
NOT
be dead.'

‘
What's that
?'

‘In severe cases,' gabbled the professor, ‘there is no perceptible pulse. And there may not be any cardiac impulse – no! – even when you put your hand over the heart.' He paused. ‘It is not a good hope; but it is possible. How far away is the nearest doctor?'

‘About six miles.'

‘Can you phone him? Is there a phone here?'

‘Yes! But in the meantime …!'

‘In the meantime,' replied Professor Rigaud, his eyes feverish as he rubbed at his forehead, ‘we must stimulate the heart. That is it! Stimulate the heart!' He squeezed up his eyes, thinking. ‘Elevate the limbs, pressure on the abdominal cavity, and … Have you got any strychnine in the house?'

‘Great Scott, no!'

‘But you have salt, yes? Ordinary table-salt? And a hypodermic needle?'

‘I think Marion
did
once have a hypodermic somewhere. I think …'

Where before everything had gone in a rush, now time seemed to have stopped. Every movement seemed intolerably slow. When it was vitally necessary to hurry, you could not hurry.

Miles turned back to the chest-of-drawers, yanked open the topmost drawer, and began to rummage. On top of the maplewood chest, brilliantly lighted now by the lamp he had put down there, stood a folding leather photograph-frame containing two large photographs. One side showed Steve Curtis, with a hat on to conceal his baldness; the other side showed Marion broad-faced and smiling, far away from the pitiable mass of flesh now vacant-eyed on the bed.

It seemed to Miles minutes, and was probably fifteen seconds, before he found the hypodermic syringe in two pieces in its neat leather case.

‘Take it downstairs,' his companion was gabbling at him, ‘and sterilize it in boiling water. Then heat some other water with a little pinch of salt in it, and bring them both up here. But first of all phone the doctor. I will take the other measures. Hurry, hurry, hurry!'

In the doorway of the bedroom, as Miles ran for it, stood Dr Gideon Fell. He had one last glimpse of those two, Dr Fell and Professor Rigaud, as he hurried out into the hall.

Rigaud, who was taking off his coat and rolling up his sleeves, spoke with a pounce.

‘You see this, dear doctor?'

‘Yes. I see it.'

‘Can you guess what
she
saw outside the window?'

Their voices faded away.

Downstairs in the sitting-room it was dark except for a splendour of moonlight. At the telephone Miles snapped on pocket lighter, finding the address-pad Marion kept there along with two London telephone directories, and dialled Cadnam 4321. He had never met Dr Garvice, even in his uncle's time; but a voice over the wire asked quick questions and got reasonably clear replies.

A minute later he was in the kitchen: which was situated on the west side of the house, across a long enclosed passage like the one upstairs, in the middle of a line of silent bed-rooms. Miles lit several lamps in the big scrubbed room. He set the gas hissing in the new white-enamel range. He ran water into saucepans and banged them on the fire, dropping in the two parts of the hypodermic, while a big white-faced clock ticked on the wall.

Twenty minutes to two o'clock.

Eighteen minutes to two o'clock …

Lord in heaven, wouldn't that water
ever
boil?

He refused to think of Fay Seton, sleeping on the ground floor in a bedroom not twenty feet away from him now.

He refused to think of her, that is, until he abruptly swung round from the stove and saw Fay standing in the middle of the kitchen behind him, with her finger-tips on the table.

Behind her the door to the passage gaped open on blackness. He hadn't heard her move on the stone floor with the linoleum over it. She was wearing a very thin white night-dress with a pink quilted wrap drawn over it, and white slippers. Her fleecy red hair lay tumbled about her shoulders. Her pink finger-nails tapped, softly and shakily, on the scrubbed top of the table.

What warned Miles was a kind of animal instinct, a
nearness
, a physical sense he always experienced with her. He turned with such suddenness that he knocked against the handle of one saucepan, which spun round on the gas-ring. The heating water hissed slightly at its edges.

And he surprised on Fay Seton's face a look of sheer hatred.

The blue eyes had a shallow blaze; the colour was high against the white skin; the lips were dry and a little drawn back. It was hatred mingled with – yes! with wild anguish. Even when he turned round she couldn't quite control it, couldn't smooth it away: though her breast rose and fell in a kind of gasp, and her finger-tips twitched together.

But she spoke gently.

‘What … happened?'

Tick – tick
, went the big clock on the wall,
tick – tick
, four times in measured beats against the silence, before Miles answered her. He could hear the hiss of the steaming water in the saucepan.

‘My sister may be dead or dying.'

‘Yes. I know.'

‘You know?'

‘I heard something like a shot. I was only dozing. I went up and looked in there.' Fay breathed this very rapidly, and gave another gasp; she seemed to be making an effort, as though force of will might control blood and nerves, to keep the colour out of her face. ‘You must forgive me,' she said. ‘I've just seen something I hadn't noticed before.'

‘Seen something?'

‘Yes. What – happened?'

‘Marion was frightened by something outside the window. She fired a shot at it.'

‘What was it? A burglar?'

‘No burglar on earth could scare Marion. She isn't what you could call a nervous type. Besides …'

‘Please tell me!'

‘The windows of that room' – Miles saw it vividly, with its blue, gold-figured curtains, and its yellow-brown carpet, and its big wardrobe and its dressing-table and its chest-of-drawers, and the easy-chair by the fireplace in the same wall as the door – ‘the windows of that room are more than fifteen feet above ground. There's nothing underneath but the blank back-wall of the library. I don't see how any burglar could have got up there.'

The water began to boil. Through Miles's mind flashed the word ‘salt'; he had completely forgotten that salt. He plunged across to the line of kitchen cupboards, and found a big cardboard container. Professor Rigaud had said only a ‘pinch' of salt; and he had said to heat the water, not boil it. Miles dropped a little into the second saucepan just as the first boiled over.

It was as though Fay Seton's knees had started to give way.

There was a kitchen chair by the table. Fay put her hand, on the back of it and slowly sat down; not looking at him, one white knee a little advanced, and the line of her shoulders tense.

The sharp teeth marks in the neck where the life-blood had been drained away
…

Miles struck at the tap of the gas-range, extinguishing it. Fay Seton sprang to her feet.

‘I – I'm awfully sorry! Can I help you?'

‘No! Stand back!'

Question and answer were flung across that quiet kitchen, under the ticking clock, in a way that was unspoken acknowledgement. Miles wondered whether his hands were steady enough to handle the saucepans; but he risked it and caught them up.

Fay spoke softly.

‘Professor Rigaud is here, isn't he?'

‘Yes. Would you mind standing to one side, please?'

‘Did you – did you believe what I said to you to-night? Did you?'

‘Yes, yes, yes!' he shouted at her. ‘But will you please for the love of heaven stand to one side? My sister …'

Scalding water splashed over the edge of the saucepan. Fay was now standing with her back to the table, pressed against it: all her self-effacement and timidity of manner gone, straight and magnificent, breathing deeply.

‘This can't go on,' she said.

Miles did not look into her eyes at that moment; he dared not. For his sudden impulse, very nearly irresistible, had been to take her in his arms. Harry Brooke had done that, young Harry since dead and rotted. And how many others, in the quiet families where she had gone to live?

Meanwhile …

He left the kitchen without looking back at her. From the kitchen the back stairs, opening off this passage, led to the upstairs hall very close to Marion's room. Miles went upstairs in the moonlight, carefully carrying the saucepans. The door of Marion's room stood open about an inch, and he almost barged slap into Professor Rigaud in the aperture.

‘I vass coming' – Professor Rigaud's English pronunciation slipped for the first time – ‘to see what delayed you.'

Something about Rigaud's expression made Miles's heart contract.

‘Professor Rigaud! Is she …?'

‘No, no, no! I have brought her to what is called the “reaction”. She is breathing and I think her pulse is stronger.'

More scalding water slopped over.

‘But I cannot tell, yet, whether this will last. Did you phone the doctor?'

‘Yes. He's on his way now.'

‘Good. Give me the kettles there. No, no, no!' said Professor Rigaud, whom emotion inclined towards fussiness. ‘You will not come in. Recovery from shock is not a pretty sight and besides you will get in my way. Keep out until I tell you.'

He took the saucepans and put them inside on the floor. Then he closed the door in Miles's face.

With a violent uneasy hope welling up even more strongly – men do not talk like that unless they expect recovery – Miles stood back. Moonlight changed and shifted at the hack of the hall; and he saw why.

Dr Gideon Fell, smoking a very large meerschaum pipe, stood beside the window at the end of the hall. The red glow of the pipe-bowl pulsed and darkened, touching Dr Fell's eyeglasses; a mist of smoke curled up ghostlike past the window.

‘You know,' observed Dr Fell, taking the pipe out of his mouth, ‘I like that man.'

‘Professor Rigaud?'

‘Yes. I
like
him.'

‘So do I. And God knows I'm grateful to him.'

‘He is a practical man, a thoroughly practical man. Which,' observed Dr Fell, with a guilty air and several furious puffs at the meerschaum, ‘it is to be feared you and I are not. A thoroughly practical man.'

‘And yet,' said Miles, ‘he believes in vampires.'

‘Harrumph. Yes. Exactly.'

‘Let's face it. What do
you
believe?'

‘My dear Hammond,' returned Dr Fell, puffing out his cheeks and shaking his head with some vehemence, ‘at the moment I'm dashed if I know. That is what depresses me. Before this present affair,' he nodded towards the bedroom, ‘before this present affair came to upset my calculations, I believed I was beginning to have more than a glimmer of light about the murder of Howard Brooke …'

‘Yes,' said Miles, ‘I thought you were.'

‘Oh, ah?'

‘When I was giving you Fay Seton's account of the murder on the tower, the look on your face once or twice was enough to scare anybody. Horror? I don't know! Something like that.'

‘Was it?' said Dr Fell. The pipe pulsed and darkened. ‘Oh, ah! I remember! But what upset me wasn't the thought of an evil spirit. It was the thought of a motive.'

‘A motive for murder?'

‘Oh, no,' said Dr Fell. ‘But it led to murder. A motive so damnably evil and cold-hearted that …' He paused. Again the pipe pulsed and darkened. ‘Do you think we could have a word, now, with Miss Seton?'

‘M
ISS
S
ETON
?' Miles repeated sharply.

He could make nothing of Dr Fell's expression now. It was a mask, fleshy and colourless against the moonlight, veiled by smoke which got into Miles's lungs. Yet the ring in Dr Fell's voice, the ring of hatred about that motive, had been unmistakable.

‘Miss Seton? I suppose so. She's downstairs now.'

‘Downstairs?' said Dr Fell.

‘Her bedroom is downstairs.' Miles explained the circumstances and narrated the events of that afternoon. ‘It's one of the pleasantest rooms in the house; only just re-decorated, with the paint hardly dry. But she is up and about, if that's what you mean. She – she heard the shot.'

‘Indeed!'

‘As a matter of fact, she slipped up here and glanced into Marion's room. Something upset her so much that she isn't quite … quite …'

‘Herself?'

‘If you want to put it like that.'

And then Miles rebelled. With human nature as resilient as it is, with Marion (as he conceived) out of danger, it seemed to him that values were re-adjusting themselves and that common sense could burst out of its prison.

‘Dr Fell,' he said, ‘let's not be hypnotized. Let's not have a spell thrown over us by Rigaud's ghouls and vampires and witch-women. Granting – even granting! – it would have been very difficult for someone to have climbed up outside the windows of Marion's room …'

‘My dear fellow,' Dr Fell said gently, ‘I
know
nobody climbed up there. See for yourself!'

And he indicated the window beside which they stood.

Unlike most of the windows in the house, which, were of the French-casement style, this was an ordinary sash-window. Miles pushed it up, put his head out, and looked towards the left.