He Who Whispers dgf-16

by John Dickson Carr

  “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 sad. “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 ts 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' 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 acknowledgment. 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 sad to you tonight? 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 of 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.”

  “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' 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 back 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 cam 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 of 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?”

  Chapter XI

  “Miss Seton?” 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 Mile'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 redecorated, 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 readjusting 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 fe
llow,” 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.

  The illuminated windows of Marion's room—four little windows set together, with two of their lights open—threw out bright light against pale green at the back of the house. Underneath was a blank wall fifteen feet high. Underneath also, which he had forgotten, ran an unplanted flower-bed nearly as broad as the wall was high: a flower-bed smooth and newly watered, of earth finely crushed and hoed, on which a cat could not have walked without leaving a trace.

  But a fury of doggedness persisted in Miles Hammond.

  “I still say,” he declared, “we'd better not be hypnotized.”

  “How so?”

  “We know Marion fired a shot, yes. But how do we know she fired it at something outside the window?”

  “Aha!” chortled Dr. Fell, and a kind of glee breathed towards Miles out of pipe-smoke. “My compliments, sir. You are waking up.”

  “We don't know it at all,” said Miles. “We only assume it because it came after all this talk of faces floating outside windows. Isn't it much more natural to think she fired at something inside the room? Something perhaps standing in front of her at the foot of the bed?”

  “Yes,” Dr. Fell assented gravely, “it is. But don't you see, my dear sir, that this doesn't in the least explain our real problem?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something,” replied Dr. Fell, “frightened you sister. Something which—without Rigaud's timely aid—would quite literally have frightened her to death.”

  Dr. Fell spoke with slow, fiery emphasis, stressing every word. His pipe had gone out, and he put it down on the sill of the open window. Even his wheezing breath snorted louder with earnestness.

  “Now I want you to think for a moment just what that means. Your sister is not, I take it, a nervous woman?”

  “Good Lord, no!”

  Dr. Fell hesitated.

  “Let me—harrumph--be more explicit. She's not one of those women who say they're not nervous, and laugh at the supernatural in daylight, and then show very different feelings by night?”

  A very vivid memory returned to Miles.

  “I remember,” he said, “when I was in hospital, Marion and Steve used to come there as often as they could”--how good they'd been, both of them--”with any jokes or stories hey thought would amuse me. One was a haunted house. A friend of Steve's (that's Marion's fiance) found it while he was on Home Guard duty. So they made up a party to go there.”

  “With what result?”

  “It seems they did find a lot of unexplained disturbances; poltergeist disturbances, not very pleasant. Steve freely confessed he had the wind up, and so did one or two others. But Marion only enjoyed it.”

  “Oh, my eye!” breathed Dr. Fell.

  He picked up the dead pipe, and put it down again.

  “The again I ask you,” Dr. Fell went on earnestly, “to remember the circumstances. Your sister was not touched or physically attacked in any way. All the evidence shows she collapsed of nervous shock because of something she saw.

  “Now suppose,” argued Dr. Fell, “this business was not supernatural. Suppose for example, I wish to scare someone by playing ghost. Suppose I clothe myself in white robes, and daub my nose with phosphorescent paint, and stick my head through a window and thunderously say, 'Boo!' to a group of old ladies in a Bournemouth boarding house.

  “It may, perhaps, give them quite a start. They may think that dear old Dr. Fell is getting some extraordinary ideas of humour. But would it really scare anyone? Would any rigged-up contrivance, any faked ingenuity of the supernatural, produce nowadays more than a momentary jump? Would it induce that shattering effect which—as we know—drains the blood from the heart and can be as deadly as a knife or a bullet?”

  Beating his fist into the palm of his left hand, Dr. Fell broke off apologetically.

  “I beg your pardon,” he added. “I did not wish either to make ill-timed jokes or alarm you with fears about your sister. But . . . Archons of Athens!”

  And he spread out his hands.

  “Yes,” admitted Miles, “I know.”

  There was a silence.

  “So you observe,” pursued Dr. Fell, “that the previous point you made ceases to be of importance. Your sister, in an excess of terror, fired a shot at something. It may have been outside the window. It may have been inside the room. It may have been anywhere. The point is: what frightened her as much as that?”

  Marion's face . . .

  “But you don't fall back on the assumption,” cried Miles, “that the whole thing comes back to a vampire after all?”

  “I don't know.”

  Putting his finger-tips to his temples, Dr. Fell ruffled the edges of the thick mop of grey-streaked hair which had tumbled over one ear.

  “Tell me,” he muttered, “is there anything your sister is afraid of?”

  “She didn't like the blitzes of the V-weapons. But then neither did anyone else.”

  “I think we may safely rule out,” said Dr. Fell, “the entrance of a V-weapon. A threatening burglar wouldn't do? Something of that sort?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Having seen something, and partly raised up in bed, she . . . by the way, that revolver in her hand: it does belong to her?”

  “The Ives-Grant .32? Oh, yes.”

  “And she kept it in the drawer of the bedside table?”

  “Presumably. I never noticed where she kept it.”

  “Something tells me,” said Dr. Fell, rubbing his forehead, “that we want the emotions and reactions of human beings—if they are human beings. We are going to have an immediate word with Miss Fay Seton.”

  It was not necessary to go and find her. Fay, who had dressed herself in the same grey frock as she had worn earlier in the evening, was coming towards them now. In the uncertain light it seemed to Miles that she had put on a great deal of lipstick, which sh did not ordinarily use.

  Her white face, composed now, floated towards them.

  “Ma'am,” said DR in a curious rumbling voice, “good evening.”

  “Good evening.” Fay stopped short. “You are . . .?”

  “Miss Seton,” introduced Miles, “this is an old friend of mine. Dr. Gideon Fell.”

  “Oh, Dr. Gideon Fell.” She was silent for a moment, and then she spoke in a slightly different tone. “You caught the Six Ashes murderer,” she said. “And the man who poisoned all those people at Sodbury Cross.”

  “Well . . .!” Dr. Fell seemed embarrassed. “I'm an old duffer, ma'am, who has had some experience with the ways of crime.”

  Fay turned to Miles.

  “I—wanted to tell you,” she said, in her usual soft voice of sincerity. “I made rather an exhibition of myself downstairs. I'm sorry. I was—upset. And I didn't even sympathize with what happened to poor Marion. Can't I be of service in any way?”

  She moved tentatively towards the bedroom door not far behind her, but Miles touched her arm.

  “Better not go in there. Professor Rigaud is acting as amateur doctor. He won't let anybody in.”

  Slight pause.

  “How—how is she?”

  “A bit better, Rigaud thinks,” said Dr. Fell. “And that, ma'am brings us to a matter I should rather like to discuss with you.” He picked up his pipe from the window-sill. “If Miss Hammond recovers, this matter will of course be no concern of the police . . .”

  “Won't it?” murmured Fay. And across her lips, in that unreal moonlit hall outside the bedroom door, flicked a smile which struck cold to the heart.

  Dr. Fell's voice sharpened. “You believe the police should be concerned in this, ma'am?”

  The curve of that terrifying smile, like a red gash in the fac
e, was gone in a flash along with the glassy turn of the blue eyes.

  “Did I say that? How stupid of me. I must have been thinking of something else. What did you want to know?”

  “Well, ma'am! As a formality! Since you were the last person presumed to be with Marion Hammond before she lost consciousness . . .”

  “I was? Why on earth should anyone think that?”

  Dr. Fell regarded her in apparent perplexity.

  “Our friend Hammond here,” he grunted, “has—harrumph--given me an account of a conversation you had with him down in the library earlier tonight. You remember that conversation.?”

  “Yes.”

  “At about half-past eleven, or thereabouts, Marion Hammond came into the library and interrupted you. Apparently you had given her a present of some kind. Miss Hammond said she had a present for you in return. She asked you to go on up to her room ahead of her, and said she she would join you after she'd had a word with her brother.” Dr. Fell cleared his throat. “You remember?”

  “Oh. Yes! Yes, of course!”

  “And therefore, presumably, you did go?”

  “How stupid of me!--Yes, of course I dd.”

  “Straight away, ma'am?”

  Fay shook her head, rapt and intent on his words.

  “No. I supposed Marion would have—personal things to talk over with Mr. Hammond there, and I thought it might be a little while before she left him. So first I went to my own room, and put on a nightgown and wrap and slippers. I came up here afterwards.”

  “How long afterwards?”

  “Ten of fifteen minutes, maybe. Marion had already got there before me.”

  “And then?”

  The moon was setting, its light grown thin. It was the turn of the night, the hour when to sick people death comes or passes by. All about them, south and east, towered the oaks and beeches of William the Conqueror's hunting forest, a forest old before him, seamed and withered with age; all night quiet, yet now subtly murmurous with a rising breeze. By moonlight the colour of Fay's moving lips.

  “The present I had given Marion,” she explained, “was a little bottle of French perfume. Jolyeux number three.”