He Who Whispers (7 page)

Miles restrained an impulse to laugh, though certainly not at her. A great dazzle of illumination came into his mind. He bent down, picked up the fallen articles, dropped them into her handbag, and closed it with a snap.

‘You arranged all this, didn't you?' he asked her.

‘Arranged? I …'

‘
You
dished the meeting of the Murder Club, by God! In some way you put off Dr Fell and Mr Justice Coleman and Dame Ellen Nye and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all! All except Professor Rigaud, because you wanted to hear his first-hand account about Fay Seton! But you knew the Murder Club had never entertained any guests except the speaker, so you hadn't bargained on
my
turning up …'

Her dead-serious voice recalled him.

‘Please! Don't make a fool of me!'

Wrenching loose from the hand he had put on her arm, Barbara ran for the door. Frédéric, a stony eye on one corner of the ceiling, slowly moved aside for her as one who calls attention to the fact that he could have sent for the police. Miles hurried after her.

‘Here! Wait! I wasn't blaming you! I …'

But she was already flying down the soft-carpeted hall, in the direction of the private stair to Greek Street.

Miles glanced round desperately. Opposite him was the illuminated sign of the gentleman's cloakroom. He snatched up his raincoat, crammed his hat on his head, and returned to face the speaking eye of Frédéric.

‘Are the dinners of the Murder Club paid for by somebody in a lump sum? Or does each person pay for his own?'

‘It is the rule for each person to pay for his own, sir. But to-night –'

‘I know, I know!' Miles thrust banknotes into the man's hand, with pleasurable exhilaration at the thought that he could nowadays afford to do so. ‘This is to cover everything. Present my distinguished compliments to Professor Rigaud, and say I'll ring him in the morning to apologize. I don't know where he's staying in London,' this was an impasse he swept aside, ‘but I can find out. Er – have I given you enough money?'

‘More than enough
money
, sir. At the same time …'

‘Sorry. My fault. Good night!'

He dared not run too hard, since his old illness was apt to claw at him and make his head swim. But his pace was tolerably fast all the same. As he got downstairs and outside, he could just see the glimmer of Barbara's white dress, under the short fur wrap, moving in the direction of Frith Street. Then he really did run.

A taxi rolled down Frith Street in the direction of Shaftesbury Avenue, its motor whirring with great distinctness in the hollow-punctuated silence of London at night. Miles shouted at it without much hope, but to his surprise it hesitatingly swerved in towards the kerb. With his left hand Miles caught at Barbara Morell's arm; with his right he twisted open the handle of the cab door before someone else should appear, ghostly out of the rain-pattering gloom, to lay claim to it.

‘Honestly,' he said to Barbara, with such a warmth of sincerity that her arm relaxed, ‘there was no reason to run away like that. You can at least let me drop you off at home. Where do you live?'

‘St John's Wood. But …'

‘Can't do it, governor,' said the taxi-driver in a fierce voice of defiance mingled with martyrdom. ‘I'm going Victoria way, and I've only just got enough petrol to get home.'

‘All right. Drop us at Piccadilly Circus tube-station.'

The car door slammed. There was a slur of tyres on wet asphalt. Barbara, in the far corner of the seat, spoke in a small voice.

‘You'd like to kill me, wouldn't you?' she asked.

‘For the last time, my dear girl: no! On the contrary. Life has been made so uncomfortable for us that every little bit helps.'

‘What on earth do you mean?'

‘A high-court judge, a barrister-politician, and a number of other important people have been carefully flummoxed at something they'd arranged. Wouldn't it delight your heart if you heard – as you never will – of an Important Person who couldn't make a reservation or got thrown back to the tail-end of a queue?'

The girl looked at him.

‘You
are
nice,' she said seriously.

This threw Miles a little off balance.

‘It isn't a question of what you call niceness,' he retorted with some violence. ‘It's a question of the Old Adam.'

‘But poor Professor Rigaud –! '

‘Yes, it's a bit rough on Rigaud. We must find a way to make amends. All the same! – I don't know why you did it, Miss Morell, but I'm very glad you did it. Except for two reasons.'

‘What reasons?'

‘In the first place, I think you should have confided in Dr Fell. He's a grand old boy; he'd have sympathized with anything you told him. And how he would have enjoyed that case of the man murdered while alone on a tower! That is,' Miles added, with the perplexity and strangeness of the night wrapping him round, ‘if it
was
a real case and not a dream or a leg-pull. If you'd told Dr Fell …'

‘But I don't even know Dr Fell! I lied about that too.'

‘It doesn't matter!'

‘It does matter,' said Barbara, and pressed her hands hard over her eyes. ‘I'd never met any of the members. But I was in a position, you see, to learn all their names and addresses, and that Professor Rigaud was speaking on the Brooke case. I phoned everybody except Dr Fell as Dr Fell's private secretary, and said the dinner had been postponed. Then I got in touch with Dr Fell as representing the President. And hoped to heaven those two would be away from home to-night if someone
did
ring up for confirmation.'

She paused, staring straight ahead at the glass partition behind the driver's seat, and added slowly:

‘I didn't do it for a joke.'

‘No. I guessed that.'

‘Did you?' cried Barbara. ‘Did you?'

The cab jolted. Motor-car lamps, odd in newness, once or twice swept the back of the cab with their brief unaccustomed glare through dingy rain-misted windows.

Barbara turned towards him. She put out a hand to steady herself against the glass partition in front. Anxiety, apology, a curious embarrassment, and – yes! her obvious liking for him – shone in her expression as palpably as her wish to tell him something else. But she did not speak that something else. She only said:

‘What was the other reason?'

‘Other reason?'

‘You told me there were two reasons why you regretted this – this foolishness of mine to-night. What's the other one?'

‘Well!' He tried to sound light and casual. ‘Hang it all, I
was
a good deal interested in that case of the murder on the tower. Since Professor Rigaud probably isn't on speaking terms with either of us –'

‘You may never hear the end of the story. Is that it?'

‘Yes, that's it.'

‘I see.' She was silent for a moment, tapping her fingers on her handbag, her mouth moving in an odd way and her eyes shining almost as though there were tears in them. ‘Where are you staying in town?'

‘At the Berkeley. But I'm going back to the New Forest to-morrow. My sister and her fiancé are coming up for the day, and we're all travelling back together.' Miles broke off. ‘Why do you ask?'

‘Maybe I can help you.' Opening her handbag, she drew out a folded sheaf of manuscript and handed it to him. ‘This is Professor Rigaud's own account of the Brooke case, specially written for the archives of the Murder Club. I – I stole it from the table at Beltring's when you went to look for him. I was going to post it on to you when I'd finished reading, but I've already learned the only thing I really wanted to know.'

Insistently she thrust the manuscript back into his hands.

‘I don't see how I can be of any use now,' she cried. ‘I don't
see
how I can be of any use now!'

With a grind of gears into neutral, with the whush of tyres erratically scraping a kerb, the taxi drew up. Ahead loomed the cavern of Piccadilly Circus from the mouth of Shaftesbury Avenue, murmurous and shuffling with a late crowd. Instantly Barbara was across the cab and outside on the pavement.

‘Don't get out!' she insisted, backing away. ‘I can go straight home in the Underground from here. And the taxi's going your way in any case. – Berkeley Hotel!' she called to the driver.

The door slammed just before eight American G.I.'s, in three different parties, bore down simultaneously on the cab. Against the gleam of a lighted window Miles caught a glimpse of Barbara's face, smiling brightly and tensely and unconvincingly in the crowd as the taxi moved away.

Miles sat back, holding Professor Rigaud's manuscript and feeling it figuratively burn his hand.

Old Rigaud would be furious. He would demand to know, in a frenzy of Gallic logic, why this trick had been played on him. And that was not funny; that was only just and reasonable; for Miles himself had still no notion why. All of which he could be certain was that Barbara Morell's motive had been a strong one, passionately sincere.

As for Barbara's remark about Fay Seton …

‘You wonder what it would be like to be in love with her.'

What infernal nonsense!

Had
the mystery of Howard Brooke's death ever been solved, by the police or by Rigaud or by anyone else? Had they learned who committed the murder, and how it was done? Evidently not, from the tenor of the professor's remarks. He had said he knew what was ‘wrong' with Fay Seton. But he had also said – though in queer, elusive terms – that he did not believe she was guilty. Every statement concerning the murder, through all that tortuous story, rang the clear indication that there had been no solution.

Therefore all this manuscript could tell him … Miles glanced at it in the semi-darkness … would be the routine facts of the police investigation. It might tell him some sordid facts about the character of a pleasant-faced woman with red hair and blue eyes. But no more.

In an utter revulsion of feeling Miles hated the whole thing. He wanted peace and quiet. He wanted to be free from these clinging strands. With a sudden impulse, before he should think better of it, he leaned forward and tapped the glass panel.

‘Driver! Have you got enough petrol to take me back to Beltring's Restaurant, and then on to the Berkeley? – Double fare if you do!'

The silhouette of the driver's back contorted with angry indecision; but the cab slowed down, slurred, and circled Eros's island back into Shaftesbury Avenue.

Miles was inspired by his new resolution. After all, he had been gone from Beltring's only a comparatively few minutes. What he proposed doing now was the only sensible thing to do. His resolution blazed brightly inside him when he jumped out of the taxi in Romilly Street, hurried round the corner to the side entrance, and up the stairs.

In the upstairs hall he found a dispirited-looking waiter occupied with the business of closing up.

‘Is Professor Rigaud still here? A short stoutish French gentleman with a patch of moustache something like Hitler's carrying a yellow cane?'

The waiter looked at him curiously.

‘He is downstairs in the bar, monsieur. He …'

‘Give him this, will you?' requested Miles, and put the still-folded manuscript into the waiter's hand. ‘Tell him it was taken by mistake. Thank you.'

And he strode out again.

On the way home, lighting his pipe and inhaling the soothing smoke, Miles was conscious of a sensation of exhilaration and buoyancy. To-morrow afternoon, when he had attended to the real business which brought him to London, he would meet Marion and Steve at the station. He would return to the country, to the secluded house in the New Forest where they had been established for only a fortnight, as a man plunges into cool water on a hot day.

That
was disposed of, cut off at the root, before it could really trouble his mind. Whatever secret appertained to a phantom image called Fay Seton, it was no concern of his.

To claim his attention there would be his uncle's library, that alluring place hardly as yet explored during the confusion of moving in and settling down. By this time to-morrow night he would be at Greywood, among the ancient oaks and beeches of the New Forest, beside the little stream where rainbow trout rose at dusk when you flicked bits of bread on the water. Miles felt, in some extraordinary way, that he had got out of a snare.

His taxi dropped him at the Piccadilly entrance to the Berkeley: he paid the driver in an expansive mood. Seeing that the lounge inside was still pretty well filled at its little round tables, Miles, with his passionate hatred of crowds, deliberately walked round to the Berkeley Street entrance so that he might breathe solitude a little longer. The rain was clearing away. A freshness tinged the air. Miles pushed through the revolving doors into the little foyer, with the reception desk on his right.

He got his key at the desk, and stood debating the advisability of a final pipe and whisky-and-soda before turning in, when the night reception clerk hurried out of the cubicle with a slip of paper in his hand.

‘Mr Hammond!'

‘Yes?'

The clerk scrutinized the slip of paper, trying to read his own handwriting.

‘There's a message for you, sir. I think you applied to the – to this employment agency for a librarian to do cataloguing work?'

‘I did,' said Miles. ‘And they promised to send an applicant round this evening. The applicant didn't turn up, which made me very late for a dinner I was attending.'

‘The applicant
did
turn up, sir, eventually. The lady says she's very sorry, but it was unavoidable. She says could you please see her to-morrow morning? She says things are very difficult, since she's only just been repatriated from France …'

‘Repatriated from France?'

‘Yes, sir.'

The hands of a gilt clock on the grey-green wall pointed to twenty-five minutes past eleven. Miles Hammond stood very still, and stopped twirling the key in his hand.