He Who Whispers (27 page)

On one side was Superintendent Hadley, trying to grip somebody's wrists. On the other side was a uniformed police-inspector. In the middle …

‘Professor Rigaud' – Dr Fell's voice spoke clearly – ‘will you be good enough to identify that chap for us? The man in the middle?'

Miles Hammond looked for himself at the staring eyes, the corners of the mouth drawn back, the writhing legs that kicked out at his captors with vicious and sinewy strength. It was Miles who answered.

‘
Identify him
?'

‘Yes,' said Dr Fell.

‘Look here,' cried Miles, ‘what is all this? That's Steve Curtis, my sister's fiancé! What are you trying to do?'

‘We are trying,' thundered Dr Fell, ‘to make an identification. And I think we have done it. For the man who calls himself Stephen Curtis
is
Harry Brooke.'

F
REDÉRIC,
the head-waiter at Beltring's Restaurant – which is one of the few places in the West End where you can get food on a Sunday – was always glad to oblige Dr Fell, even when Dr Fell wanted a private room at short notice.

Frédéric's manner froze to ice when he saw the doctor's three guests: Professor Rigaud, Mr Hammond, and small fair-haired Miss Morell, the same three who had been at Beltring's two nights before.

But the guests did not seem happy either, especially at what Frédéric considered a very tactful gesture on his part; for he ushered them into the same private dining-room as before, the room used by the Murder Club. He noticed that they seemed to eat rather from a sense of duty than any appreciation of the menu.

He did not see that their looks were even stranger afterwards, when they sat round the table.

‘I will now,' groaned Professor Rigaud, ‘take my medicine. Continue.'

‘Yes,' said Miles, without looking at Dr Fell. ‘Continue.' Barbara was silent.

‘Look here!' protested Dr Fell, making vast and vague gestures of distress which spilled ash from his pipe down his waistcoat. ‘Wouldn't you rather wait until …?'

‘No,' said Miles, and stared hard at a salt-cellar.

‘Then I ask you,' said Dr Fell, ‘to take your mind back to last night at Greywood, when Rigaud and I had arrived on Rigaud's romantic mission to warn you about vampirism.'

‘I also wished,' observed the professor a trifle guiltily, ‘to have a look at Sir Charles Hammond's library. But in all the time I am at Greywood the one room I do not see is the library. Life is like that.'

‘You and Rigaud and I,' he pursued, ‘were in the sitting-room, and you had just told me Fay Seton's own account of the Brooke murder.

‘Harry Brooke, I decided, was the murderer. But his motive? That was where I had the glimmer of a guess – based, I think on your description of Fay's hysterical laughter when you asked if she had married Harry – that these anonymous letters, these slanderous reports, were a put-up job managed by the unpleasant Harry himself.

‘Mind you! I never once suspected the reports were really true after all, until Fay Seton told me so herself in the hospital this evening. It made blazing sense of so much that was obscure; it completed the pattern; but
I
never suspected it.

‘What I saw was an innocent woman traduced by the man who pretended to be in love with her. Suppose Howard Brooke found this out, from the mysterious letter Harry was writing on the afternoon of the murder? In that case the person we must find was the equally mysterious correspondent, Jim Morell.

‘This hypothesis would explain why Harry killed his father. It would show Fay as innocent of everything except – for some reason of her own! – hiding the brief-case that was dropped into the river, and never denouncing Harry. In any case the charge of vampirism was nonsense. I was just announcing this to you when …

‘We heard a revolver-shot upstairs. We found what had happened to your sister.

‘And I didn't understand
anything
.

‘However! Let me now put together certain points I saw for myself, certain information you gave me, and certain other information given by your sister Marion when she was able to make a statement before we left Greywood. Let me show you how the whole game was played out under your eyes.

‘On Saturday afternoon, at four o'clock, you met your sister and “Stephen Curtis” at Waterloo Station. In the tea-room you flung your hand-grenade (though of course you didn't know it at the time) by announcing you had engaged Fay Seton to come to Greywood. Is that correct?'

‘Steve! Steve Curtis!' Resolutely Miles shut out of his mind the face that kept appearing between him and the candle-flames.

‘Yes,' Miles agreed. ‘That's correct.'

‘How did the alleged Stephen Curtis receive the news?'

‘In the light of what we know now,' Miles replied dryly, ‘it would be a strong understatement to say he didn't like it. But he announced that he couldn't go back to Greywood with us that evening.'

‘Had you known he couldn't go back to Greywood with you that evening?'

‘No! Now you mention it, it surprised Marion as much as it did me. Steve began to talk rather hastily about a sudden crisis at the office.'

‘Was the name of Professor Rigaud mentioned at any time? Was “Curtis” aware you'd met Rigaud?'

Miles pressed a hand against his eyes, reconstructing the scene. He saw, in blurred colours which sharpened to such ugliness, ‘Steve' fiddling with his pipe and ‘Steve' putting on his hat and ‘Steve' somewhat shakily laughing.

‘No!' Miles responded. ‘Come to think of it, he didn't even know I'd gone to a meeting of the Murder Club, or what the Murder Club was. I did say something about “the professor”, but I'll swear I never mentioned Rigaud's name.'

Dr Fell bent forward, with a pink-faced and terrifying benevolence.

‘Fay Seton,'
Dr Fell said softly,
‘still held the evidence which could send Harry Brooke to the guillotine. But, if Fay Seton were disposed of, there would apparently be nobody to connect “Stephen Curtis” with Harry Brooke?'

Miles started to push back his chair.

‘God Almighty!' he said. You mean …?'

‘So-oftly!' urged Dr Fell, waving a mesmeric hand before eyeglasses coming askew. ‘But here – oh, here! – is the point at which I want you to jog your memory. During that conversation, when you and your sister and the so-called Curtis were present, was anything said about rooms?'

‘About rooms?'

‘About bedrooms!' persisted Dr Fell, with the air of a monster lurking in ambush. ‘About bedrooms! Eh?'

‘Well, yes. Marion said she was going to put Fay in her bedroom, and move downstairs herself to a better ground-floor room we'd just been redecorating.'

‘Ah!' said Dr Fell, nodding several times. ‘It did seem to me I heard you talking at Greywood about the bedroom situation. So your sister wanted to put Fay Seton in
her
bedroom! Oh, ah! Yes! But she didn't do it?'

‘No. She wanted to do it that evening, but Fay refused. Fay preferred the ground-floor room because of her heart. Fewer stairs to climb.'

Dr Fell pointed with his pipe.

‘But suppose,' he suggested, ‘you believe Fay Seton will be in the upstairs bedroom at the back of the house. Suppose, to make dead sure of this, you keep a watch on the house. You hide yourself among the trees at the rear of the house. You look up at a line of uncurtained windows. And, at some time before midnight„ what do you see?

‘You see Fay Seton – wearing nightgown and wrap – slowly walking back and forth in front of those windows.

‘Marion Hammond can't be seen at all. Marion is sitting in a chair over at the other side of the room, by the bedside table. She can't even be seen through the side or eastern windows, because they're curtained. But Fay Seton
can
be seen.

‘And further suppose, in the black early hours of the morning, you creep into that dark bedroom intent on a neat and artistic murder. You are going to kill someone asleep in that bed. And, as you approach, you catch a very faint whiff of perfume: a distinctive perfume always associated with Fay Seton.

‘You can't know, of course, that Fay has made the present of a little bottle of this perfume to Marion Hammond. The perfume bottle stands now on the bedside table. But you can't know that. You can only breathe the scent of that perfume. Is there any doubt in your mind now?'

Miles had seen it coming, seen it coming ever since Dr Fell's first remark. But now the image seemed to rush out at him.

‘Yes!' said Dr Fell with emphasis. ‘Harry Brooke, alias Stephen Curtis, planned a skilful murder. And he got the wrong woman.'

There was a silence.

‘However!' added Dr Fell, sweeping out his arm in a gesture which sent a coffee cup flying across the little dining-room, but which nobody noticed. ‘However! I am again indulging in my deplorable habit of anticipating the evidence.

‘Last night, let it be admitted, I was royally stumped. With regard to the Brooke murder, I
believed
Harry had done the deed. I
believed
Fay Seton had afterwards got the brief-case, with its damning raincoat, and still had it; in fact, I hinted as much to her with a question about underwater swimming. But nothing seemed to explain this mysterious attack on Marion Hammond.

‘Even an incident on the following morning did not quite unseal these eyes. It was the first time I ever saw “Mr Stephen Curtis”.

‘He had returned, very brisk and jaunty, apparently from London. He strolled into the sitting-room while you' – Dr Fell again looked very hard at Miles – ‘were speaking on the phone to Miss Morell. Do you remember?'

‘Yes,' said Miles.

‘
I
remember the conversation,' said Barbara. ‘But …'

‘As for myself,' rumbled Dr Fell, ‘I was just behind him, carrying a cup of tea on a tray.' Dr Fell furrowed up his face with intense concentration. ‘Your words to Miss Morell, in “Stephen Curtis's” hearing, were (harrumph) almost exactly as follows.

‘ “There was a very bad business here last night,” you said to Miss Morell. “Something happened in my sister's room that seems past human belief.” You broke off at the beginning of another sentence as “Stephen Curtis” came in.

‘Instantly you got up to reassure him, in a fever of care that he shouldn't worry. “It's all right,” you said to him; “Marion's had a very bad time of it, but she's going to get well.” You recall that part of it too?'

Very clearly Miles could see ‘Steve' standing there, in his neat grey suit, with the rolled-up umbrella over his arm. Again he saw the colour slowly drain out of ‘Steve's' face.

‘I couldn't see his face,' – it was as though Dr Fell, uncannily, were answering Miles's thoughts – ‘but I heard this gentleman's voice go up a couple of octaves when he said “Marion?” Just like that!

‘Sir, I tell you this: if my wits worked better in the morning (as they do not) that one word would have given the whole show away. “Curtis” was completely thunderstruck. But why should he have been? He had just heard you announce that something very bad had occurred in your sister's room.

‘Suppose I return home, and hear someone saying over the telephone that something very bad has occurred in my wife's room? Don't I naturally assume that the accident, or whatever it is, has occurred to my wife? Am I bowled over with utter astonishment when I hear that the victim
is
my wife, and not my Aunt Martha from Hackney Wick?

‘That tore it.

‘Unfortunately, I failed at the moment to see.

‘But do you remember what he did immediately afterwards? He deliberately lifted his umbrella, and very coolly and deliberately smashed it to flinders across the edge of the table. “Stephen Curtis” is supposed to be – he pretends to be – a stolid kind of person. But that was Harry Brooke hitting the tennis-ball. That was Harry Brooke not getting what he wanted.'

Miles Hammond stared at memory.

‘Steve's' personable face: Harry Brooke's face. The fair hair: Harry Brooke's hair. Harry, Miles reflected, hadn't gone prematurely grey from nerves, as Professor Rigaud said he would; he had lost the hair, and it was for some reason grotesque to think of Harry Brooke as nearly bald.

That was why they thought of him as older, of course. ‘Steve' might have been in his late thirties. But they had never heard his age.

They
: meaning himself and Marion …

Miles was roused by Dr Fell's voice.

‘This gentleman,' the doctor went on grimly, ‘saw his scheme dished. Fay Seton was alive; she was there in the house. And you gave him, unintentionally, almost as bad a shock a moment afterwards. You told him that
another
person who knew him as Harry Brooke, Professor Rigaud, was at Greywood; and was, in fact, upstairs asleep in “Curtis's” own room.

‘Do you wonder he turned away and went over towards the bookshelves to hide his face?

‘Disaster lurked ahead of every step he took now. He had tried to kill Fay Seton, and nearly killed Marion Hammond instead. With that plan gone …'

‘Dr Fell!' said Barbara softly.

‘Hey?' rumbled Dr Fell, drawn out of obscure meditation. ‘Oh, ah! Miss Morell! What is it?'

‘I know I'm an outsider.' Barbara ran her finger along the edge of the tablecloth. ‘I have no real concern in this, except as one who wants to help and can't. But' – the grey eyes lifted pleadingly – ‘but please,
please
, before poor Miles goes crazy and maybe the rest of us as well, will you tell us what this man did that frightened Marion so much?'

‘Ah!' said Dr Fell.

‘Harry Brooke,' said Barbara, ‘is a poisonous worm. But he's not clever. Where did he get the idea for what you call an “artistic” murder?'