He Who Whispers
( Dr. Gideon Fell - 16 )
John Dickson Carr
A Dr Gideon Fell mystery and classic of the locked-room genre Outside the little French city of Chartres, industrialist Howard Brookes is found dying on the parapet of an old stone tower. Evidence shows that it was impossible for anyone to have entered at the time of the murder, however someone must have, for the victim was discovered stabbed in the back. Who could have done it? And where did they go? When no one is convicted, the mystery remains unsolved for years until a series of coincidences brings things to a head in post-war England, where amateur sleuth Dr. Gideon Fell is on the scene to work out what really happened.
He Who Whispers
Copyright, 1946 by John Dickson Carr
I
A dinner of the Murder Club―our first meeting in more than five years―will be held at Beltring’s Restaurant on Friday. June 1st, at 8:30 p.m. The speaker will be Professor Rigaud. Guests have not hitherto been permitted; but if you, my dear Hammond, would care to come along as my guest . . . ?
That, he thought, was a sign of the times.
A fine rain was falling, less a rain than a sort of greasy mist, when Miles Hammond turned off Shaftesbury Avenue into Dean Street. Though you could tell little from the darkened sky, it must be close on half-past nine o’clock. To be invited to a dinner of the Murder Club, and then to get there nearly an hour late, was more than mere discourtesy; it was infernal, unpardonable cheek even though you had a good reason.
And yet, as he reached the first turning where Romilly Street trails along the outskirts of Soho, Miles Hammond stopped.
A sign of the times, the letter in his pocket. A sign in this year nineteen-forty-five, that peace had crept back unwillingly to Europe. And he couldn’t get used to it.
Miles looked round him.
On his left, as he stood at the corner of Romilly Street, was the east wall of St. Anne’s Church. The grey wall, with its big round-arched window, stood up almost intact. But there was no glass in the window, and nothing beyond except a grey-white tower seen through it. Where high explosive had ripped along Dean Street, making chaos of matchboard houses and spilling strings of garlic into the road along with broken glass and mortar-dust, they had now built a neat static-water tank―with barbed wire so that children shouldn’t fall in and get drowned. But the scars remained, under whispering rain. On the east wall of St. Anne’s, just under that gaping window, was an old plaque commemorating the sacrifice of those who died in the last war.
Unreal!
No, Miles Hammond said to himself, it was no good calling this feeling morbid or fanciful or a product of war-nerves. His whole life now, good fortune as well as bad, was unreal.
Long ago you enter the Army, with a notion that solid walls are crumbling and that something must be done about it somehow. You get, numerically, that form of Diesel-oil poisoning which in the Tank Corps is nevertheless as deadly as anything Jerry throws at you. For eighteen months you lie in a hospital bed, between white galling sheets, with a passage of time so slow that time itself grows meaningless. And then, when the trees are coming into leaf for the second time, they write and tell you that Uncle Charles has died―cosily as always, in a safe hotel in Devon―and that you and your sister have inherited everything.
Have you always been naggingly short of money? Here’s all you want.
Have you always been fond of that house in the New Forest, with Uncle Charlie’s library attached? Enter!
Have you―far more than either of these things―longed of r freedom from the stifle of crowding, the sheer pressure of humanity like the physical pressure of travelers packed into a bus? Freedom from regimentation, with space to move and breathe again? Freedom to read and dream, without a sense of duty towards anybody and everybody? All this should be possible too, if the war is ever finished.
Then, gasping out to the end like a gauleiter swallowing poison, the war was is over. You come out of hospital―a little shakily, your discharge-papers in your pocket―into a London still pinched by shortages; a London of long queues, erratic buses, dry pubs; a London where they turn on the street-lights, and immediately turn them off again to save fuel; but a place free at last from the intolerable weight of threats.
People didn’t celebrate that victory hysterically, as for some reason or other the newspapers liked to make out. What the news-reels showed was only a bubble on the huge surface of the town. Like himself, Miles Hammond thought, most people were a little apathetic because they could not yet think of it as real.
There was Beltring’s on the left, four floors once painted white and still faintly whitish in the dusk. Distantly a late bust rumbled in Cambridge Circus, making the street vibrate. Lighted windows gathered strength against the mist of rain, which seemed to splash more loudly here. There, just as of old, was the uniformed commissionaire at the entrance to Beltring’s.
But, if you were to attend a dinner of the Murder Club you did not go in by the front door. Instead you went around the corner, to the side entrance in Greek Street. Beyond a low door, and up a thick-carpeted flight of stairs―according to popular legend, this was once royalty’s discreet way of entering―you emerged into an upstairs passage with the doors of private rooms along one side.
Half-way up the stairs, faintly hearing that rich subdued murmur which is the background of a rich subdued restaurant, Miles Hammond knew a moment of sheer panic.
He was the guest to-night of Dr. Gideon Fell. But, even as a guest, he was none the less an outsider.
This Murder Club had become as famous in legend as the exploits of that scion of royalty whose private stair he was now ascending. The Murder Club’s membership was restricted to thirteen: nine men and four women. The names of its members were celebrated, some all the more celebrated for being unobtrusively so, in law, in literature, in science, in art. Mr. Justice Coleman was a member. So was Dr. Banford, the toxicologist, and Merridew, the novelist, and Dame Ellen Nye, the actress.
Before the war they were accustomed to meet four times a year, in two private rooms at Beltring’s always assigned to them by Frederic, the head-waiter. There was an outer room with an improvised bar, and an inner room for the dinner. In the inner room―where Frederic, for the occasion, always hung the engraving of the skull on the wall―these men and women, as solemn as children, sat far into the night discussing murder cases which had come to be known as classics.
Yet here was he, Miles Hammond…
Steady!
Here was he―an outsider, almost an imposter―dripping in his sodden hat and raincoat up the stairs of a restaurant where in the old days he could seldom afford to eat. Scandalously late, feeling shabby in his very bones, nerving himself to face craned necks and inquiring eyebrows as he walked in…
Steady, curse you!
He had to remind himself that once upon a time, in the far-off hazy days before the war, there had been a scholar named Miles Hammond: last of a long line of academic forbears of whom his uncle, Sir Charles Hammond, had only recently died. A scholar names Miles Hammond had won the Nobel Prize for History in nineteen-thirty-eight. And that person, amazingly enough, was himself. He mustn’t let illness gnaw away his nerves. He had every right to be here! But the world is always changing, always altering its shape; and people forget very easily.
In such a mood of cynicism Miles reached the upstairs hall, where discreet lights behind frosted glass shone on polished mahogany doors. It was deserted and quiet, except for a distant murmur of conversation. It might have been Beltring’s before the war. Over one door was an illuminated sign that said, “Gentlemen’s Cloakroom,” and he hung his hat and overcoat inside. Across the hall from it he saw a mahogany door bea
ring the placard, “Murder Club.”
Miles opened the door, and stopped short.
“Who― A woman’s voice struck across at him, suddenly. It went up with something like a note of alarm, before it regained its soft and casual level. “Excuse me,” the voice added uncertainly, “but who are you?”
“I’m looking for the Murder Club,” said Miles.
“Yes, of course. Only…”
There was something wrong here. Something very wrong.
A girl in a white evening-gown was standing in the middle of the outer room, her gown vivid against thick dark carpet. The room was rather dimly lighted, behind buff shades. Its heavy curtains, obscurely patterned in gold, had been drawn across the two windows facing Romilly Street. A long white-covered table had been pushed in front of these windows to serve as a bar; a bottle of sherry, a bottle of gin and another of bitters, stood beside a dozen polished unused glasses. Except for the girl, there was nobody else in this room.
In the right-hand wall Miles could see double-doors, partly open, leading into the inner room. He could see a big circular table set for dinner, with chairs set stiffly round it; the gleaming silver was ranged just as stiffly; the table decorations, roses, made a scarlet pattern against green ferns on the white cloth; the four tall candles remained unlighted. Over the mantel piece was a sign that the Murder Club was in session.
But the Murder Club was not in session. There was nobody there, either.
Then Miles became conscious that the girl had moved forward.
“I’m awfully sorry,” she said. The low, hesitant voice, infinitely delightful after the professionally pleasant tones of nurses, warmed his heart. “It was very rude of me to shout out like that.”
“Not at all! Not at all!”
“I―I suppose we’d better introduce ourselves.” She raised her eyes. “I’m Barbara Morell.”
Barbara Morell? Barbara Morell? Which one of the celebrities could this be?
For she was young, and she had grey yes. Most of all you were conscious of her extraordinary vitality, her aliveness, in a world grown half bloodless from war. It showed in the sparkle of the grey eyes, the turn of the head and mobility of the lips, the faint pink flush of the skin in face and neck and shoulders above the white gown. How long was it, he wondered, since he had last seen a girl in evening-dress?
And in the face of that―what a scarecrow he must look!
In the wall between the two curtained windows facing Romilly Street there was a long mirror. Miles could see duskily reflected the back of Barbara Morell’s gown, cut off at the waist by the bar-table, and the sleek knot into which she had done her sleek ash-blonde hair. Over her shoulder was reflected his own countenance: gaunt, wry, and humorous, with the high cheek-bones under long red-brown eyes, and the thread of grey in his hair making him seem forty-odd instead of thirty-five; rather like an intellectual Charles the Second, and (God’s fish!) just as unprepossessing.
“I’m Miles Hammond,” he told her, and looked about desperately for someone to whom he could apologize for his lateness.
“Hammond?” There was a slight pause. Her grey eyes were fixed on him, wide open. “You aren’t a member of the club, then?”
“No. ‘m a guest of Dr. Gideon Fell.”
“Of Dr. Fell? So am I! I’m not a member, either. But that’s just the trouble.” Miss Barbara Morell spread out her hands. “Not a single member has turned up tonight. The whole club has just… disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Yes.”
Miles stared round the room.
“There’s nobody here,” the girl explained, “except you and me and Professor Rigaud. Frederic the head-waiter is nearly frantic, and as for Professor Rigaud…well!” She broke off. “Why are you laughing?”
Miles had not meant to laugh. In any case, he told himself, you could hardly call it laughing.
“I beg your pardon,” he hastened to say. “I was only thinking―
“Thinking what?”
“Well! For years this club has been meeting, each time with a different speaker to give them the inside story of some celebrated horror. They’ve discussed crime: They’ve revelled in crime; they’ve even hung the picture of a skull on the wall as their symbol.”
“Yes?”
He was watching the line of her hair, hair of such pale ash-blonde that it seemed almost white, parted in the middle after what seemed to him an old-fashioned manner. He met the upturned grey eyes, with their dark lashes and dead-black points of iris. Barbara Morell pressed her hands together. She had an eager way of gibing you her whole attention, of seeming to hang on every word you uttered, very flattering to the scarred nerves of a man in convalescence.
He grinned at her.
“I was only thinking,” he answered, “that it would be a triumph of sensationalism if on the night o this meeting each member of the club mysteriously disappeared from his home. Or if each were found, as the clock struck, sitting quietly at home with a knife in his back.”
The attempt at a joke fell flat. Barbara Morell changed colour slightly.
“What a horrible idea!”
“Is it? I’m sorry. I only meant…”
“Do you by any chance write detective stories?”
“No. But I read a lot of them. That is―oh, well!”
“This is serious,” she assured him, with a small-girl naiveté and still a heightened colour in her face. “After all, Professor Rigaud has come a very long distance to tell them about this case, this murder on the tower; and then they treat him like this! Why?”
Suppose something had happened? It was incredible, it was fantastic, yet anything seemed possible when the whole evening was unreal. Miles pulled his wits together.
“Can’t we do something about finding out what’s wrong?” he demanded. “Can’t we telephone?”
“They have telephoned!”
“To whom?”
“To Dr. Fell; he’s the Honorary Secretary. But there wasn’t any reply. Now Professor Rigaud is trying to get in touch with the President, this judge, Mr. Justice Coleman…”
It became clear, however, that he had not been able to get in touch with the President of the Murder Club. The door to the hall opened, with a sort of silent explosion, and Professor Rigaud came in.
Georges Antoine Rigaud, Professor of French literature at the University of Edinburgh, had a savage catlike roll in his gait. He was short an stout; he was bustling; he was a little untidy, from bow tie and shiny dark suit to square-toed shoes. His hair showed very black above the ears, in contrast to a large bald head and a faintly purplish complexion. In general, Professor Rigaud varied between a portentous intensity of manner and a sudden expansive chuckle which showed the gleam of a gold tooth.
But no expansiveness was in evidence now. His thin shells of eyeglasses, even his patch of black moustache, seemed to tremble with rigid indignation. His voice was gruff and husky, his English almost without accent. He held up a hand, palm outwards.
“Do not speak to me, please,” he said.
On the seat of a pink-brocaded chair against the wall lay a soft dark hat with a flopping brim, and a thick cane with a curved handle. Professor Rigaud bustled over and pounced on them.
His manner was now one of high tragedy.
“For years,” he said, before straightening up, “they have asked me to come to this club. I say to them: No, no, no!―because I do not like journalists. ‘There will be no journalists,’ they tell me, ‘to quote what you say.’ ‘You promise that?’ I ask. ‘Yes!’ they say. Now I have come all the way from Edinburgh. And I could not get a sleeper on the train, either, because of ‘priority.’” He straightened up and shook a bulky arm in the air. “This word priority is a word which stinks in the nostrils of honest men!”
“Hear, hear, hear,”said Miles Hammond with fervour.
Professor Rigaud woke up from his indignant dream, fixing Miles with a hard little glittering eye from behind the thin shells of glasses
.
“You agree, my friend?”
“Yes!”
“That is god of you. You are―?”
“No,” Miles answered his unspoken question, “I’m not a missing member of the club. I’m a guest too. My name is Hammond.”
“Hammond?” repeated the other. Interest and suspicion quickened in his eye. “You are not Sir Charles Hammond?”
“No. Sir Charles Hammond was my uncle. He …”
“Ah, but of course!” Professor Rigaud snapped his fingers. “Sir Charles Hammond is dead. Yes, yes, yes! I read of this in the newspapers. You have a sister. You and your sister have inherited the library.”
Barbara Morell, Miles noticed, was looking more than a little perplexed.
“My uncle,” he said to her, “was a historian. He lived for years in a little house in the New Forest, accumulating thousands of books piled up in the wildest and craziest disorder. As a matter of fact, my main reason for coming to London was to see whether I couldn’t get a trained librarian to put the books in order. But Dr. Fell invited me to the Murder Club . . .”
“The library!” breathed Professor Rigaud. “The library!”
A strong inner excitement seemed to kindle and expand inside him like steam, making his chest swell and his complexion a trifle more purplish.
“That man Hammond,” he declared with enthusiasm, “was a great man! He was curious! He was alert! He”―Professor Rigaud twisted his wrist, as one who turns a key―pried into things! To examine his library I would give much. To examine his library I would give . . . But I forgot. I am furious.” He clapped on his hat. “I will go now.”
“Professor Rigaud,” the girl called softly.
Miles Hammond, always sensitive to atmospheres, was conscious of a slight shock. For some reason there had been a subtle change in the attitude of both his companions, or so it seemed to him, ever since he had mentioned his uncle’s house in the New Forest. He could not analyse this; perhaps he had imagined it.
But when Barbara Morell suddenly clenched her hands and called out, there could be no doubt about the desperate urgency in her tone.
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