He Who Whispers

by John Dickson Carr

  ‘None of us (let us face it) has too-steady nerves nowadays, especially where bumps or bangs are concerned. You said your sister didn’t like the blitzes or the V-weapons. That was the only sort of thing that might have frightened her, as it did.

  ‘And, by thunder, sir! – if you are worrying about your sister, if you are feeling sorry for things, if you are wondering how she will take it when she hears of all this, just ask yourself what she would have been let in for if she had married “Stephen Curtis”.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Miles. He put his elbows on the table and his temples in his hands. ‘Yes, I see. Go on.’

  ‘Harrumph, ha!’ said Dr Fell.

  ‘Once having tumbled to the trick early this afternoon,’ he continued, ‘the whole design unrolled itself at once. Why should anyone have attacked Marion Hammond like that?

  ‘I remembered the interesting reaction of “Mr Curtis” to the announcement that it was Marion who had been frightened. I remembered your own remarks about bedrooms. I remembered a woman’s figure in nightgown and wrap, walking back and forth in front of uncurtained windows. I remembered a perfume bottle. And the answer was that nobody had tried to frighten Marion Hammond. The intended victim was Fay Seton.

  ‘But in that case …

  ‘First of all, you may remember, I went up to your sister’s bedroom. I wanted to see if the assailant might have left any traces.

  ‘There would have been no violence, of course. The murderer wouldn’t even have needed to tie his victim. After the first few minutes he wouldn’t have needed to hold her at all; he could use his two hands for his revolvers – one empty, one loaded – because the pistol-muzzle at the temple would have been enough.

  “But it was just possible that the gag (which he had to have) might have left some traces on her teeth or on her neck. There were none, nor were there traces of anything left on the floor round the bed.

  ‘In the bedroom, a study in frightened woe again presented itself in the person of “Mr Stephen Curtis”. Why should “Stephen Curtis” be interested in trying to kill a total stranger like Fay Seton, with a trick taken from the life of Cagliostro?

  ‘Cagliostro suggested Professor Rigaud. Professor Rigaud suggested Harry Brooke, whom he had tutored in matters of …

  ‘O Lord! O Bacchus!

  ‘It wasn’t possible “Stephen Curtis” might be Harry Brooke?

  ‘No, fantastic! Harry Brooke was dead. A truce to this nonsense!

  ‘At the same time, while I vainly looked round the carpet for traces left by the murderer, some whisk of scatterbrained intelligence kept on working. It suddenly occurred to me that I was overlooking evidence which had been under my nose since last night.

  ‘A shot was fired in here, the would-be murderer using for business gun the .32 Ives-Grant he must have known Marion Hammond kept in the bedside table (“Curtis” again), and for empty gun any old weapon he brought along. Very well!

  ‘At some time following the shot, Miss Fay Seton slipped up to this bedroom and peeped in. She saw something which upset her badly. She wasn’t frightened, mind you. No! It was caused by …’

  Miles Hammond intervened.

  ‘Shall I tell you, Dr Fell?’ he suggested. ‘I talked to Fay in the kitchen, where I was boiling water. She’d just come from the bedroom. Her expression was hatred: hatred, mixed with a kind of wild anguish. At the end of the conversation she burst out with, “This can’t go on!”’

  Dr Fell nodded.

  ‘And she also told you, as I am now aware,’ Dr Fell inquired, ‘that she’d just seen something she hadn’t noticed before?’

  ‘Yes. That’s right.’

  ‘What, then, could she have noticed in Marion Hammond’s bedroom? That was what I asked myself in that same bedroom: in the presence of yourself, and Dr Garvice, and the nurse, and “Stephen Curtis”.

  ‘After all, Fay Seton bad been in that room for quite a long while on Saturday night, talking to Miss Hammond, evidently without seeing anything strange on her first visit to the room.

  ‘Then I remembered that eerie conversation I had with her later the same night – out at the end of the passage, in the moonlight – when her whole attitude burned with a repressed emotion that made her smile, once or twice, like a vampire. I remembered the queer reply she made to one of my questions, when I was asking her about her visit during which she talked to Marion Hammond.

  ‘ “Mostly,” said Fay Seton in referring to Marion, “she did the talking, about her fiancé and her brother and her plans for the future.” Then Fay, for no apparent reason, added these inconsequential words: “The lamp was on the bedside table; did I tell you?”

  ‘Lamp? ‘That reference jarred me at the time. And now …

  ‘After Marion Hammond was found ostensibly dead, there were two lamps taken into the room. One was carried by you’ – he looked at Professor Rigaud – ‘and the other’ – he looked at Miles – ‘was carried by you. Think, now, both of you! Where did you set those lamps down?’

  ‘I do not follow this!’ cried Rigaud. ‘My lamp, of course, I placed on the bedside table beside one that is not burning.’

  ‘And you?’ demanded Dr Fell of Miles.

  ‘I’d just been told,’ replied Miles, staring at the past, ‘that Marion was dead. I was holding up the lamp, and my whole arm started to shake so that I couldn’t hold it any longer. I went across and put the lamp down – on the chest of drawers.’

  ‘Ah!’ murmured Dr Fell. ‘And now tell me, if you please, what was also on that chest of drawers?’

  ‘A big leather picture-frame, containing a big photograph of Marion on one side and a big photograph of “Steve” on the other. I remember the lamp threw a strong light on those pictures, though that side of the room had been darkish before, and –’

  Miles broke off in realization. Dr Fell nodded.

  ‘A photograph of “Stephen Curtis”, brilliantly lighted,” said Dr Fell. ‘That was what Fay Seton saw, staring at her from the room as she peeped in at the doorway after the shot. It explained her whole attitude.

  ‘She knew. By thunder, she knew!

  ‘Probably she didn’t at all guess how the Cagliostro trick had been worked. But she did know the attempt had been made on her and not on Marion Hammond, because she knew who was behind it Marion Hammond’s fiancé was Harry Brooke.

  ‘And that finished it. That was the last straw. That really did make her white with hatred and anguish. Once more she had tried to find a new life, new surroundings; she had been decent; she had forgiven Harry Brooke and concealed the evidence against him about his father’s murder; and destiny still won’t leave off hounding her. Destiny, or some damnable force which has it in for her, has brought Harry Brooke back from nowhere to try to take her life …’

  Dr Fell coughed.

  ‘I have bored you with this at some length,’ he apologized, ‘though the process of thinking it took perhaps three seconds while I wool-gathered in that bedroom in the presence of Miles Hammond, and the doctor, and the nurse, and “Curtis” himself, who was standing by the chest of drawers then.

  ‘To determine whether I was right about the Cagliostro trick, it further occurred to me, should be very simple. There is a scientific test, called the Gonzalez test or the nitrate test, by which you can infallibly prove whether a given hand did or did not fire a given revolver.

  ‘If Marion Hammond hadn’t pulled that trigger, I could write Q.E.D. And if Harry Brooke did happen to be dead as they claimed, it looked as though the crime must have been committed by an evil spirit.

  ‘I somewhat imprudently announced this, to the annoyance of Dr Garvice, who responded by slinging us all out of the bedroom. But there were some interesting repercussions immediately afterwards.

  ‘My first move, of course, was to put Miss Fay Seton in a corner and make her admit all this. I asked Garvice, in the presence of “Curtis”, whether he would be good enough to send Miss Seton up to see me. There followed, from “Curtis”, an outburst of
nerves which shocked even you.

  ‘Suddenly he realized he was wasting time; the girl might be up here at any minute. He must get away out of sight. He said he was going to his room to lie down, and – bang! I could have laughed, you know, if the whole thing hadn’t been so grotesquely wicked and bitter. No sooner did “Stephen Curtis” touch his bedroom door, than you shouted to him not to go in there, because Professor Rigaud – who also knew Harry Brooke – was asleep and mustn’t be disturbed.

  ‘No, by thunder! He mustn’ t be disturbed!

  ‘Do you wonder, again, that “Curtis” plunged down the back stairs as though the devil were after him?

  ‘But I had little time to speculate about this, because Dr Garvice returned with some information which thoroughly scared me. Fay Seton had gone. The note she left, especially that line, “A brief-case is so useful, isn’t it?” let the cat out of the bag: or, more properly, the raincoat out of the brief-case.

  ‘I knew what she was going to do. I had been a prize idiot for not realizing it the night before.

  ‘When I had told Fay Seton that if Miss Hammond recovered this matter would be no concern of the police, that was where she had smiled in so terrifying a way and murmured, “Won’t it?” Fay Seton was sick and tired and ready to blow up.

  ‘At her room in town she had the evidence which could still send Harry Brooke to the guillotine. She was damned well going to get it, return with it, throw it in our faces, and call for an arrest.

  ‘And so – look out!

  ‘The alleged Stephen Curtis was really desperate. If he used his head, he wasn’t dished even yet. When he crept up there in the dark, and played the Cagliostro trick, Marion hadn’t seen him and hadn’t heard any voice except a whisper. She would never have thought (and didn’t, when we talked to her later) that the attacker was her own fiancé. Nobody else had seen him; he had slipped into the house by the back door, up the back staircase, into the bedroom, and down again to get away before you others reached the bedroom after the shot.

  ‘But Fay Seton, returning alone to a solitary forest place, with hanging evidence?

  ‘That was why, my dear Hammond, I sent you after her in such haste and instructed you to stay with her. Afterwards things went all wrong.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Professor Rigaud, snorting and rapping on the table to call for attention.

  ‘This jolly farceur,’ continued Rigaud, ‘dashes into my bedroom where I am asleep, hauls me from bed, hauls me to the window, and says, “Look!” I look out, and I see two persons leaving the house. “That’s Mr Hammond,” says he; “but quick, quick, quick, who is the other man?” “My God”, I say, “either I am dreaming or it is Harry Brooke”. And he plunges away for the telephone.’

  Dr Fell grunted.

  ‘What I hadn’t remembered,’ Dr Fell explained, ‘is that Hammond had read the woman’s note aloud, in ringing tones which carried to a half-crazed man at the foot of the back stairs. And,’ added Dr Fell, turning to Miles, ‘he went along with you in the car to the station. Didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes! But he didn’t get aboard the train.’

  ‘Oh, yes, he did,’ said Dr Fell. By the simple process of jumping in after you did. You never noticed him, never thought of him, because you were searching so feverishly for a woman. When you searched that train, any man, if he kept a newspaper in front of his face as so many were doing, would never get a second glance.

  ‘You failed to find Fay Seton either, for which you must blame your own overwrought state of mind. There was nothing in the least mysterious about it. She was in a state of mind even less receptive to crowds than yours; she did what many people do nowadays if they are good-looking women and can get away with it; she travelled in the guard’s van.

  ‘That is a foolish episode leading to a last tragic episode.

  ‘Fay went to London in a blank hysteria of rage and despair. She was going to end all this. She was going to tell the truth about everything. But then, when Superintendent Hadley was actually in her room urging her to speak …’

  ‘Yes?’ prompted Barbara.

  ‘She still found she couldn’t do it,’ said Dr Fell.

  ‘You mean she was still in love with Harry Brooke?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Dr Fell. ‘That was all past and gone. That had been only a momentary idea of respectability. No: it was a part, now, of the same evil destiny that kept hounding her whatever she did. You see, the Harry Brooke, who became metamorphosed into Stephen Curtis …’

  Professor Rigaud waved his hands.

  ‘But this,’ he interrupted, ‘is another thing I do not understand. How did that change come about? When and how did Harry Brooke become Stephen Curtis?’

  ‘Sir,’ replied Dr Fell, ‘above all things my spirit is wearied by the routine card-indexing necessary to check up on a person’s papers. Since you have formally identified the man as Harry Brooke, I leave the rest to Hadley. But I believe’ – he looked at Miles – ‘you haven’t known “Curtis” for a very long time?’

  ‘No; only for a couple of years.’

  ‘And according to your sister, he was invalided out of the Forces comparatively early in the war?’

  ‘Yes. In the summer of nineteen-forty.’

  ‘My own guess,’ said Dr Fell, ‘is that Harry Brooke in France at the outbreak of the war couldn’t endure the threat constantly hanging over him. It wore his temperament to shreds. He couldn’t stand the idea of Fay Seton with evidence that would … well, think of the cold morning at dawn and the blade of the guillotine looming in front of you.

  ‘So he decided to do what many other men have done before him: to cut free, and make a new life for himself. After all, the Germans were over-running France; in his opinion, for good; his father’s money, his father’s goods were lost to him in any case. In my opinion, there was a real Stephen Curtis who died in the retreat to Dunkirk. And Harry Brooke, in the French Army, was attached to the British as interpreter. In the chaos of that time, I think he assumed the clothes and papers and identity of the real Stephen Curtis.

  ‘In England he built up this identity. He was six years older, a dozen years older as we count time in war, than the boy who thought he wanted to be a painter. He had a reasonably solid position. He was comfortably engaged to a girl who had come into money, and who managed him as in his heart he always wanted to be managed …’

  ‘It’s odd you should say that,’ Miles muttered. ‘Marion commented on exactly the same thing.’

  ‘This was the position when Fay appeared to wreck him. The poor fellow didn’t really want to kill her, you know.’ Dr Fell blinked at Miles. ‘Do you remember what he asked you, in the tea-room at Waterloo, after he’d got over the first nauseating shock?’

  ‘Stop a bit!’ said Miles. ‘He asked me how long it would take Fay to catalogue the books in the library. You mean …?’

  ‘If it had taken only a week or so, as he suggested, he might have found some excuse for keeping out of her way. But you swept that away by saying it would take months. So the decision was made like that.’ Dr Fell snapped his fingers. ‘Fay could destroy his new position, even if she didn’t denounce him as his father’s murderer. And so, remembering the suggestion from the fife of Cagliostro …’

  ‘I will clear my character of this,’ said Professor Rigaud in a frenzy. ‘I once told him, yes, that a person with a weak heart might be frightened to death like that. But the detail of neatly placing the revolver in the victim’s hand, so it will be believed she has fired the shot itself: that I do not think of. That is criminal genius!’

  ‘I quite agree,’ said Dr Fell. ‘And I sincerely trust no one else will imitate him. You create a murder in which the victim appears to have frightened herself to death, at the sight of some intruder who was never there.’

  Professor Rigaud was still in a frenzy.

  ‘Not only was this not my invention,’ he declared, ‘but – how I hate crime, myself! – with this added detail I do not even recognize the trick when I se
e it played in from of me.’ He paused, drew a handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped his forehead.

  ‘Had Harry Brooke,’ he added, ‘any other such ingenious plan in his head when he followed Fay Seton to London this afternoon?’

  ‘No,’ said Dr Fell. ‘He was merely going to kill her and destroy all the evidence. I shiver to think what might have happened if he had got to Bolsover Place before Hammond and Miss Morell. But “Curtis” was following them, do you see? With Fay Seton in the guard’s van, he couldn’t find her either. So he had to follow them if he wanted to be led to her.

  ‘Then Hadley arrived. And “Curtis”, who could hear everything from the passage outside the room in Bolsover Place, lost his head. His only idea now was to get that raincoat – the blood-stained raincoat, the one thing utterly damning to him – before Fay broke down and exposed him.

  ‘He threw the main electric switch in the fuse-box outside in the passage. He got away in the dark with the brief-case, and dropped it in flight because he was clinging so hard to the raincoat still weighted with heavy stones. He ran straight out of that house into …’

  ‘Into what?’ demanded Miles.

  ‘A policeman,’ said Dr Fell. ‘You may remember that Hadley didn’t even bother to chase him? Hadley merely opened the window and blew a police whistle. We’d arranged matters over the telephone to be prepared if anything like that happened.

  ‘Harry Brooke, alias Stephen Curtis, was kept at the police station in Camden High Street until Rigaud and I arrived back from Hampshire. Then he was brought round to Bolsover Place for formal identification by Rigaud. I told you, my dear Hammond, that Hadley’s task wouldn’t be pleasant for one of you three; and I meant you. But it leads me to the one word I want to say at the end.’

  Dr Fell sat back in his chair. He picked up his meerschaum pipe, dead with white ash, and put it down again. A vast discomfort or something like it made him puff out his cheeks.

  ‘Sir,’ he begun in a thunderous voice, which he managed to tone down, ‘I do not think you need worry unduly about your sister Marion. Unchivalrous as it may sound, I say to you that this young lady is as tough as nails. She will suffer very little harm from the loss of Stephen Curtis. But Fay Seton is another matter.’