John Carr - He Who Whispers

“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 fellow,” 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.”