He Who Whispers
Page 23
The little dining-room was silent. They could hear the rain outside.
‘I have told you all her story now,’ pursued Dr Fell, ‘or nearly all of it. I should say no more, since the matter is none of my business. And yet these past six years cannot have been a very easy time for her.
‘She was hounded from Chartres. She was hounded, with a threat of arrest for murder, even in Paris. I am inclined to suspect, since she wouldn’t show her French identity papers to Hadley, that she made her living on the streets.
‘Yet there was some quality in that girl’s nature – call it generosity, call it a sense of fatality, call it anything you like – that would not let her speak out, even at the end, and denounce a person who had once been her friend. She feels that an evil destiny has got her and will never let her go. She has at best only a few months more to live. She lies now in a hospital, sick and dispirited and without hope. What do you think of it all?’
Miles rose to his feet.
‘I’m going to her,’ he said.
There was a sharp scraping noise on the carpet as Barbara Morell pushed her chair back. Barbara’s eyes were opened wide.
‘Miles, don’t be a fool!’
‘I’m going to her.’
Then it all poured out.
‘Listen,’ said Barbara, resting her hands on the table and speaking quietly but very fast. ‘You’re not in love with her. I knew that when you told me about Pamela Hoyt and the dream you had. She’s just the same as Pamela Hoyt: unreal, a dust-image out of old books, a dream you’ve created in your own mind.
‘Listen, Miles! That’s what threw the spell over you. You’re an idealist and you’ve never been anything else. Whatever – whatever mad plan you’ve got in your head, it could only end in disaster even before she died. Miles, for heaven’s sake!’
He went over to the chair where he had left his hat.
Barbara Morell – sincere, sympathetic, advising him for his own good as Marion did – let her voice rise to a small scream.
‘Miles, it’s silly! Think what she is!’
‘I don’t give a curse what she is,’ he said. ‘I’m going to her.’
And once more Miles Hammond went out of the little dining-room at Beltring’s, and hurried down the private stairs into the rain.
A DR GIDEON FELL MYSTERY
A classic of the locked-room genre
‘Very few detective stories baffle me nowadays, but
Mr Carr’s always do’
Agatha Christie
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.
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T H E L A N G T A I L P R E S S
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