He Who Whispers dgf-16

by John Dickson Carr

  “Oh, so-and-so to Professor Rigaud!” sad Stephen and bolted down the back stairs like a man pursued.

  The troubling of the waters again!

  Now, Miles thought, it had reached out and touched Steve as well. It seemed to colour every action and inspire every thought here at Greywood. He still refused, fiercely refused, to believe anything whatever against Fay Seton. But what had Dr. Fell meant by that remark about an evil spirit? Surely to heaven it wasn't intended to be taken quite literally? Miles swung around, to find Dr. Fell's gaze fixed on him.

  “You are wondering,” inquired Dr. Fell, “what I want with Miss Seton? I can tell you very simply. I want the truth.”

  “The truth about what?”

  “The truth,” returned Dr. Fell, “about Howard Brooke's murder and the fright-bogy of last night. And she can't, for her soul's sake she daren't, evade questions now. I think we shall have it settled in a very few minutes.”

  They heard quick footsteps on the distant front stairs. A figure appeared at the other end of the long, narrow hall. When Miles saw that it was Dr. Laurence Garvice, when he saw Dr. Garvice's hastened stride, he had one of those inspired premonitions which can fly to the heart of truth.

  It seemed a very long time before the physician reached them.

  “I thought I'd better come up and tell you,” he announced. “Miss Seton is gone.”

  Dr. Fell's crutch-handled stick dropped with a clatter on the bare boards.

  “Gone?” His voice was so husky that he had to clear his throat.

  “She—er--left this for Mr. Hammond,” said Garvice. “At least,” he amended hastily, “I assume she's gone. I found this,” he held up a sealed envelope, “propped up against the pillow in her bedroom.”

  Miles took the envelope, which was addressed to him in a fine, clear, sharp-pointed handwriting. He turned it over in his fingers, momentarily without the courage to open it. But when he did grit his teeth and tear ope the envelope, he was a little reassured by the contents of the folded note inside.

  DEAR MR. HAMMOND,

  I am sorry to say I shall have to be absent in London today on a matter that compels attention. I think now I was wise to keep my little room in town. And a brief-case is so useful, isn't it? But don't worry. I shall return after nightfall.

  Yours sincerely,

  Fay Seton.

  The sky , which had been fine, was clouding over with little smoky wisps of black: a moving sky, an uneasy sky. Miles held the letter close to the window, and read it aloud. That was when the ominous word “brief-case” stuck out at him.

  “Oh, my God!” breathed Dr. Fell. He said this very simply, as a man might witness ruin or tragedy. “And yet I ought to have guessed it. I ought to have guessed it. I ought to have guessed it!”

  “But what's wrong?” demanded Miles. “Fay says she'll be back after nightfall.”

  “Yes. Oh, ah. Yes.” Dr. Fell rolled his eyes. “I wonder what time she left here? I WONDER what time she left here?”

  “I don't know,” said Garvice hastily. “Don't look at me!”

  “But somebody must have seen her go!” bellowed Dr. Fell. “A conspicuous girl like that? Tall, red-haired, probably wearing . . .”

  The door to Marion's bedroom opened, Miss Peters, putting her head out in protest against the noise, saw Dr. Garvice and stopped short.

  “Oh. Didn't know you were here, Doctor,” the nurse said pointedly, in a small reproving voice. Afterwards, moved by human curiosity, she wavered. “Pardon me. If you're looking for a woman of that description . . .”

  Dr. Fell wheeled round in vastness.

  “Yes?”

  “I think maybe I saw her,” the nurse informed him.

  “When?” roared Dr. Fell. The nurse shied back. “Where?”

  “Nearly—nearly three-quarters of an hour ago, when I was coming here on my bicycle. She was getting on the bus out in the main road.”

  “A bus,” demanded Dr. Fell, “that would take her to Southampton Central railway station? Oh, ah! And what train to London could she catch by taking the bus?”

  “Well, there's the one-thirty,” replied Garvice. “She could make that one comfortably.”

  “The one-thirty?” echoed Miles Hammond. “But that's the train I'm taking! I intended to get the bus that would . . .”

  “You mean that wouldn't,” corrected Garvice with a rather strained smile. “You'll never make that train by bus, even by private car unless you drove like Sr Malcolm Campbell. It's ten minutes past one now.”

  “Listen to me,” said Dr. Fell in a voice he very seldom used. His hand fell on Miles' shoulder. “You are going to catch that one-thirty train.”

  “But that's impossible! There's a man who does a car-hire service to and from the station—Steve always uses him—but it would take too long to get him here. It's out of the question!”

  “You forget,” said Dr. Fell, “that Rigaud's illegally borrowed car is still outside in the drive.” There was a wild, strained look in his eyes. “Listen to me!” he repeated. “It is absolutely vital for you to overtake Fay Seton. Absolutely vital. Are you willing to have a shot at catching the train?”

  “Hell, yes. I'll drive her at ninety an hour. But suppose I do miss the train?”

  “I don't know!” roared Dr. Fell as though in physical pain, and hammered his fist against his temple. “This 'little room in town' she speaks about. She's going there—yes, of course she is! Have you got her London address?”

  “No. She came straight to me from the employment agency.”

  “in that case,” said Dr. Fell, “you have simply got to catch the train. I'll explain as much as possible while we run. But something damnable is going to happen, I warn you here and now, if that woman tries to carry out her plans. It is quite literally a matter of life and death. You have got to catch that train!”

  Chapter XIV

  The guard's whistle piped shrilly.

  Two or three last doors slammed. The one-thirty train to London, smoothly gliding, drew out of Southampton Central Station and gathered speed so that its windows seemed to flash past.

  “You can't do it, I tell you!” panted Stephen Curtis.

  “Want to bet?” Miles said through his teeth. “Drive the car back, Steve. I'm all right now.”

  “Never jump on a train when it's going as fast as that!” yelled Stephen. “Never . . .”

  The voice receded. Miles was running blindly beside the door of a first-class smoking compartment. He dodged a luggage-truck, with someone shouting at him, and laid hold of the door-handle. Since the train was on his let-hand side as he ran, the jump wasn't going to be easy.

  He yanked open the door, felt through his back the terrifying crick-crack twinge of overbalancement as he jumped, saved himself by a reeling catch at the side of the door, and, with the dizziness of his old illness pouring through his head, slammed the door behind him.

  He had made it. He was on the same train with Fay Seton. Miles stood at the open window, panting and half-blind, staring out and listening to the click of the wheels. When he had partly got his breath he turned round.

  Ten pairs of eyes regarded him with barely concealed loathing.

  The first-class compartment, nominally built to seat six persons, now held five squeezed in on each side. To railway travellers there is always something infuriating about a late arrival who gets in at the last moment, and this was a particularly bad case. Though no one said anything, the atmosphere was glacial except for a stoutish Waaf who gave him a glance of encouragement.

  “I—er--beg you pardon,” said Miles.

  He wondered vaguely whether he ought to add a maxim from the letters of Lord Chesterfield, some little apothegm of this sort; but he sense the atmosphere and in any case he had other things to worry about.

  Miles stumbled hastily across feet, gained the door to the corridor, went out and closed it behind him and a general wave of thankfulness. Here he stood considering. He was reasonably presentable, havi
ng sloshed water on his face and scraped himself raw with a dry razor, though his empty stomach cried aloud. But this wasn't important.

  The important thing was to find Fay immediately.

  It was not a long train, and not very crowded. That is to say, people were packed into seats trying to read newspapers with their hands flat against their breasts like corpses; dozens stood in the corridor amid barricades of luggage. But few were actually standing inside the compartments except those fat women with third-class tickets who go and stand in first-class compartments, radiating reproachfulness, until some guilty-feeling male gives them his seat.

  Working his way along the corridors, tripping over luggage, becoming entangled with people queuing for lavatories, Miles tried to work out a philosophical essay in his mind. He was watching, he said to himself, a whole cross-section of England as the rain rattled and swayed, and the green countryside flashed by, and he peered into one compartment after another.

  But, in actual fact, he wasn't feeling philosophical.

  After a first quick journey he was apprehensive. After a second he was panicky. After a third . . .

  For Fay Seton was not aboard the train.

  Steady, now! Don't get the wind up!

  Fay's got to be here!

  But she wasn't.

  Miles stood in a corridor midway along the length of the train, gripping the window-raining and trying to keep calm. The afternoon had grown warmer and darker, in black smoky clouds that seemed to mix with the smoke of the train. Miles stared out of the window until the moving landscape blurred. He was seeing Dr. Fell's frightened face, and hearing Dr. Fell's voice.

  That “explanation,” delivered by the doctor in a vacant undertone while engaged in cramming biscuits into Miles' pockets to take the place of breakfast, had not been very coherent.

  “Find her and stay with her! Find her and stay with her!” That had been the burden of it. “If she insists on coming back to Greywood tonight, that's all right—in fact, it's probably the best thing—but stay with her and don't leave her side for a minute!”

  “Is she in danger?”

  “In my opinion, yes,” said Dr. Fell. “And if you want to see her proved innocent of”--he hesitated—“of at least the worst charge against her, for the love of heaven don't fail me!”

  The worst charge against her?

  Miles shook his head. The jerk of the train swayed and roused him. Fay had either missed the train—which seemed incredible, unless the bus had broken down—or, more probably, she had turned back after all.

  And here he was speeding away in the opposite direction, away from whatever might be happening. But . . . hold on! Here was a hopeful point! . . . the “something damnable” Dr. Fell had predicted seemed to concern what would occur if Fay went to London and returned to carry out her plans. That meant there was nothing to worry about. Or did it?

  Miles could never remember a longer journey. The train was an express; he couldn't have got out to turn back if he had wanted to. Rain-ships stung the windows. Miles got entangled with a family party which overflowed from compartment into corridor like a camp-fire group, and remembered that its sandwiches were in a suitcase under a mountainous pile of somebody else's luggage, and for a time created the general wild aspect of moving-day. It was twenty minutes to four when the train drew in at Waterloo.

  Waiting for him, just outside the barrier, stood Barbara Morell.

  The sheer pleasure he felt at seeing her momentarily drove out his anxieties. Round them the clacking torrent from the train poured through the barrier. From the station loud-speaker a refined voice hollowly enunciated.

  “Hello,” said Barbara.

  She seemed more aloof than he remembered her.

  “Hello,” said Miles. “I—er--hardly liked to drag you over here to the station.”

  “Oh, that's all right,” said Barbara. He well remembered, now, the grey eyes with their long black lashes. “Besides, I have to be at the office later this evening.”

  “At the office? On Sunday night?” “I'm in Fleet Street,” said Barbara. “I'm a journalist. That's why I said I didn't 'exactly' write fiction.” She brushed this away. The grey eyes studied him furtively. “What's wrong?” she asked suddenly. “What is it? You look . . .”

  “There's the devil and all to pay,” Miles burst out. He felt somehow that he could let himself go in front of this girl. “I was supposed to find Fay Seton at any cost. Everything depended on it. We all thought she'd be in this train. Now I don't know what in blazes to do, because she wasn't in the train after all.”

  “Wasn't in the train?” Barbara repeated. Her eyes opened wide. “But Fay Seton was in the train! She walked through that barrier not twenty seconds before you did!”

  “Will pass-en-gers for Hon-i-ton,” sang the dictatorial loudspeaker, “join the queue outside Platform Num-ber Nine! Will pass-en-gers for Hon-i-ton . . .”

  It blattered above every other noise in the station. And yet the realm of nightmare had returned.

  “You must have been seeing things!” said Miles. “I tell you she wasn't aboard that train!” He looked round wildly as a new thought occurred to him. “Stop a bit! So you do know her after all?”

  “No! I'd never set eyes on her before in my life!”

  “Then how do you know it was Fay Seton?”

  “From the photograph. The coloured photograph Professor Rigaud showed us on Friday night. After all, I . . . I though she was with you. And so I wasn't going to keep the appointment. Or at least—I didn't quite know. What's wrong?”

  This was disaster fine and full.

  He wasn't mad, Miles told himself; and he wasn't drunk, and he wasn't blind; and he could take his oath Fay Seton had not been aboard that train. Fantastic images occurred to him, of a white face and a red mouth. These images were exotic plants which withered in the atmosphere of Waterloo Station, certainly in the atmosphere of the train he had just left.

  Yet he looked down at Barbara's fair hair and grey eyes; he thought of her normalness-that was it! A lovable normalness—in this murky affair; and at the same time he thought of all that had happened since he saw her last.

  Marion was lying in a stupor at Greywood, and not from the effects of poison or a knife. Dr. Fell had spoken of an evil spirit. These things were not fancies; they were facts. Miles remembered his impression of that morning: here's a malignant force, and Dr. Fell knows what it is; we'll kill it, or it will kill us; and, in sober God's truth, the game had begun now.

  All this went through his head in the split-second of Barbara's remark.

  “You saw Fay Seton come through the gates,” he said. “In which direction did she go?”

  “I couldn't tell. There are too many people.”

  “Wait a minute! We're not beaten yet! Professor Rigaud told me last night . . . yes, he's at Greywood too! . . . that you 'phoned him yesterday, and that you knew Fay's address. She's got a room in town somewhere, and according to Dr. Fell she'll go straight to it. Do you know the address?”

  “Yes!” Barbara, in a tailored suit and white blouse, with a mackintosh draped over her shoulders and an umbrella hung across her arm, fumblingly opened her handbag and took out an address-book. “This is t. Fiver Bolsover Place, N.W.1. But . . .!”

  “Where's Bolsover Place??”

  “Well, Bolsover Street is off Camden High Street in Camden Town. I—I looked it up when I wondered whether I ought to go and see her. It's rather a dingy neighborhood, but imagine she's even more hard up than the rest of us.”

  “What's her quickest way to get there?”

  “By Underground, easily. You can go straight through from here without a change.”

  “Then that's what she's done, you can bet a fiver! She can't be two minutes ahead of us! Probably we can catch her! Come on!”

  Give me some luck! He was praying under his breath. Give me just one proper hand to play, one card higher than a deuce or a three! And not long afterwards, when they burst out of a ticket-queue
and penetrated down into the airless depths where a maze of lines join, he got his card.

  Miles heard the rumble of the approaching train as they emerged on the platform of the Northern Line. They were at one end of the platform, and people straggled for more than a hundred yards along its curve. Vision was blurred in this half-cylinder cavern, once brave with white tiling, now sordid and ill-lighted.

  The red train swept out of its tunnel in a gale of wind, and streamed past to a stop. And he saw Fay Seton.

  He saw her by the bright flash of windows now unscaled from blast-netting. She was standing at the extreme other end of the platform, the front of the train; and she moved forward as the doors rolled open.

  “Fay!” he yelled. “Fay!”

  It went completely unheard.

  “Edgware train!” the guard was bellowing. “Edgware train!”

  “Don't try to run up there!” warned Barbara. “The doors will close and we'll lose her together. Hadn't we better go in here?”

  They dived into the rear car of the train, a non-smoker, just before the doors did close. Its only other occupants were a policeman, a somnolent-looking Australian soldier, and the guard at his panel of control-buttons. Miles had got only a faint glimpse of Fay's face; but it had looked fierce, preoccupied, with that same curious smile of last night.

  It was maddening to be so close to her, and yet . . .

  “If I can get through to the front of the train--!”

  “Please!” urged Barbara. She indicated the sign, “Do Not Pass From One Car To Another Whilst The Train Is In Motion”' she indicated the guard, and she indicated the policeman. “It wouldn't do much good, would it,if you got yourself arrested now?”

  “No. I suppose not.”

  “She'll get out at Camden Town. So will we. Sit down here.”

  In their ears was a soft, streaming thunder as the train rocketed through the tunnel. The car swayed and creaked round a curve; lights behind opaque glass jolted on the upholstery of the seats. Miles, all his nerves twitching with doubt, and down beside Barbara on a double-seat facing forward.

  “I don't like to ask too many questions,” continued Barbara, “but I've been half mad with curiosity ever since I talked to you on the 'phone. What is all the urgency about overtaking Fay Seton?