He Who Whispers

by John Dickson Carr

  ‘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 conversati
on,’ 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?’

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ said Professor Rigaud, with an air of powerful gloom like Napoleon at St Helena, ‘he got it from ME. And I have received it from an incident in the life of Count Cagliostro.’

  ‘Of course!’ breathed Barbara.

  ‘Madernoiselle,’ said Professor Rigaud in a fever, beginning to hammer the flat of his hand on the table, ‘will you oblige me by not saying “of course” on the wrong occasions? Explain, if you please’ – the rapping grew to a frenzy – ‘how you mean “of course” or how you could possibly mean “of course”!’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Barbara looked round helplessly. ‘I only meant you told us yourself you kept lecturing to Harry Brooke about crime and the occult …’

  ‘But what’s occult about this?’ asked Miles. ‘Before you arrived this afternoon, Dr Fell, our friend Rigaud talked a lot of gibberish about that business. He said that what frightened Marion was something she had heard and felt, but not seen. But that’s impossible on the fate of it.’

  ‘Why impossible?’ asked Dr Fell.

  ‘Well! Because she must have seen something! After all, she did fire a shot at it …’

  ‘Oh, no, she didn’t!’ said Dr Fell sharply.

  Miles and Barbara stared at each other.

  ‘But a shot,’ insisted Miles, ‘was fired in that room when we heard it?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Then at whom was it fired? At Marion?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ answered Dr Fell.

  Barbara put a soothing hand gently on Miles’s arm.

  ‘Maybe it would be better,’ she suggested, ‘if we let Dr Fell tell it in his own way.’

  ‘Yes,’ Dr Fell sounded fussed. He looked at Miles. ‘I think – harrumph – I am perhaps puzzling you a little,’ he said in a tone of genuine distress.

  ‘Odd as it may sound, you are.’

  ‘Yes. But there was no intention to puzzle. You see, I should have realized all along your sister could never have fired that shot. She was relaxed. Her whole body, as in all cases of shock, was completely limp and nerveless. And yet, when we first saw her, her fingers were clutched round the handle of the revolver.

  ‘Now that’s impossible. If she had fired a shot before collapsing, the mere weight of the revolver would have dragged it out of her hand. Sir, it meant that her fingers were carefully placed round the revolver afterwards, in a very fine bit of misdirection, to throw us all off the track.

  ‘But I never saw this until this afternoon when, in my scatterbrained way, I was musing over the life of Cagliostro. I found myself touching lightly on various incidents in his career. I remembered his initiation into the lodge of a secret society at the King’s Head Tavern in Gerrard Street.

  ‘Frankly, I am very fond of secret societies myself. But I must point out that initiations in the eighteenth century were not exactly tea-parties at Cheltenham to-day. They were always unnerving. They were sometimes dangerous. When the Grand Goblin issued an order of life-or-death, the neophyte could never be sure he didn’t mean business.

  ‘So let us see!

  ‘Cagliostro – blindfolded and on his knees – had already had something of an unnerving time. Finally they told him he must prove his fidelity to the order, even if it meant his death. They put a pistol into his hand, and said it was loaded. They told him to put the pistol to his own head, and pull the trigger.

  ‘Now the candidate believed, as anyone would, that this was only a hoax. He believed the hammer would fall on an empty gun. But in that one second, stretching out to eternity, when he pulled the trigger …

  ‘Cagliostro pulled the trigger. And instead of a click there was a thunderous report, the flash of the pistol, the stunning shock of the bullet.

  ‘What had happened, of course, was that the pistol in his hand was empty after all. But, at the very instant he pulled the trigger, someone else holding another pistol beside his ear – pointing away from him – had fired a real shot and rapped him sharpl
y over the head. He never forgot that single instant when he felt, or thought he felt, the crash of the bullet into his own head.

  ‘How would that do as an idea for murder? The murder of a woman with a weak heart?

  ‘You creep up in the middle of the night. You gag your victim, before she can cry out, with some soft material that will leave no traces afterwards. You hold to her temple the cold muzzle of a pistol, an empty pistol. And for minutes, dragging terrible minutes in the small hours of the night, you whisper to her.

  ‘You are going to kill her, you explain. Your whispering voice goes on, telling her all about it. She does not see a second pistol loaded with real bullets.

  ‘At the proper time (so runs your own plan) you will fire a bullet close to her head, but not so close that the expansion of gases will leave powder-marks on her. You will then put the revolver into her own hand. After her death it will be believed that she fired at some imaginary burglar or intruder or ghost, and that no other person was there at all.

  ‘So you keep on whispering, multiplying terrors in the dark. The time, you explain, is at hand now. Very slowly you squeeze the trigger of the empty gun, to draw back the hammer. She hears the oily noise of the hammer moving back . . slowly, very slowly … the hammer creaking farther … the hammer at its peak before it strikes, and then …’

  Whack!

  Dr Fell brought his hand down sharply on the table. It was only that, the noise of a hand striking wood; and yet all three of his listeners jumped as though they had seen the flash and heard the shot.

  Barbara, her face white, got up and backed away from the table. The candle-flames, too, were still shaking and jumping.

  ‘Look here!’ said Miles. ‘Damn it all!’

  ‘I – harrumph – beg your pardon,’ said Dr Fell, making guilty gestures and fixing his eyeglasses more firmly on his nose. ‘It was not really meant to upset anyone. But it was necessary to make you understand the diablerie of the trick.

  ‘On a woman with a weak heart it was not at all problematical; it was certain. Forgive me, my dear Hammond; but you saw what happened in the case of a sound woman like your sister.