John Carr - He Who Whispers

“Until,” supplied Miles, with an intensity of bitterness, “until Harry Brooke came rushing up to her, exuding hypocritical shock, and cried out, 'My God, Fay, somebody's killed Dad.' No wonder Fay looked a trifle cynical when sh told me!”

“One moment!” said Professor Rigaud.

After first giving the impression of hopping up and down, though in fact he did not move, Professor Rigaud raised his forefinger impressively.

“In this cynicism,” he declared, “I begin to see a meaning for much. Death of all lives, yes! This woman,”--he shook his forefinger--”this woman now possesses evidence which can send Harry Brooke to the guillotine!” He looked at Dr. Fell. “Is it not so?”

“For you also,” assented Dr. Fell, “Whang in the gold.”

“In this brief-case,” continued Rigaud, his face swelling, “are the stones used to weigh it and Harry's raincoat stained with blood inside where his father has worn it. It would convince any court. It would show the truth.” He paused, considering. “Yet Fay Seton does not use this evidence.”

“Of course not,” said Barbara.

“Why do you say of course, mademoiselle?”

“Don't you see?” cried Barbara. “She'd got to a state of-of tiredness, of bitterness, where she could practically laugh? It didn't affect her any longer. She wasn't even interested in showing up Harry Brooke for what he was.

“She, the amateur harlot! He, the amateur murderer and hypocrite! Let's be indulgent to each other's foibles, and go our ways in a world where nothing will ever come right anyway. I—I don't want to sound silly, but that's how you really would feel about a situation like that.

“I thin,” said Barbara, “she told Harry Brooke. I think she told him she wasn't going to expose him unless the police arrested her. But, in case the police did arrest her, she was going to keep that brief-case with ts contents hidden away where nobody could find it.

“And she did keep the brief-case! That's it! She kept it for six long years! Sh brought I to England with her. It was always where she could find I. Bu she never had any reason to touch it, until . . . until . . .”

Barbara's voice trailed off.

Her yes looked suddenly and vaguely frightened, as though Barbara wondered whether her own imagination had carried her too far. For Dr. Fell, with wide-eyed and wheezing interest, was leaning forward in expectancy.

“Until--?” prompted Dr. Fell, in a hollow voice like wind along the Underground tunnel. “Archons of Athens! You're doing it! Don't stop there! Fay Seton never had any reason to touch the brief-case until . . .?”

But Miles Hammond hardly heard this. Sheer hatred welled up in his throat and choked him.

“So Harry Brooke,” Miles said, “Still got away with it?”

Barbara swung round from Dr. Fell. “How do you mean?”

“His father protected him,” Miles made a fierce gesture, “even when Harry bent over a dying man and mouthed out, 'Dad, who did this?' Now we learn that even Fay Seton protected him. “Steady, my boy! Steady!”

“The Harry Brookes of this world,” said Miles, “always get away with it. Whether it's luck, or circumstances, or some celestial gift in their own natures, I don't pretend to guess. That fellow ought to have gone to the guillotine, or spent the rest of his life on Devil's Island. Instead it's Fay Seton, who never did the least harm to anybody, who . . .” His voice rose up. “By God, I wish I could have met Harry Brooke six years ago! I'd give my soul to have a reckoning with him!”

“That's not difficult,” remarked Dr. Fell. “Would you like to have a reckoning with him now?”

An enormous crash of thunder, rolling in broken echoes over the roof-tops, flung ts noise into the room. Raindrops blew past Dr. Fell as he sat by the window: not quite so ruddy of countenance now, with his unlighted pipe in his hand.

Dr. Fell raised his voice.

“Are you out there, Hadley?” he shouted.

Barbara jumped away from the door; staring, she groped back to stand at the foot of the bed. Professor Rigaud used a French expletive not often heard in polite society.

And then everything seemed to happen at once.

As a rain-laden breeze came in at the windows, making the hanging lamp sway over the chest-of-drawers, some heavy weight thudded against the outside of the closed door to the passage. The knob twisted only slightly, but frantically, as though hands fought for it. Then the door banged open, rebounding against the wall. Three men, who were trying to keep their feet while fighting, lurched forward in a wrestling-group which almost toppled over when it banged against the tin box.

On one side was Superintendent Hadley, trying to grip somebody's wrists. On the other side was a uniformed police-inspector. In the middle . . .

“Professor Rigaud”--Dr. Fell's voice spoke clearly—“will you be good enough to identify that chap for us? The man in the middle?”

Miles Hammond looked for himself at the staring eyes, the corners of the mouth drawn back, the writhing legs that kicked out at his captors with vicious and sinewy strength. It was Miles who answered.

“Identify him?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Fell.

“Look here,” cried Miles, “what is all this? That's Steve Curtis, my sister's fiance! What are you trying to do?”

“We are trying,” thundered Dr. Fell, “to make an identification. And I think we have done it. For the man who calls himself Stephen Curtis is Harry Brooke.”

Chapter XX

Frederic, the head-waiter at Beltring's Restaurant—which is one of the few places in the West End where you can get food on a Sunday—was always glad to oblige Dr. Fell, even when Dr. Fell wanted a private room on short notice.

Frederic's manner froze to ice when he saw the doctor's three guests: Professor Rigaud, Mr. Hammond, and small fair-haired Miss Morell, the same three who had been at Beltring's two nights before.

But the guests did not seem happy either, especially at what Frederic considered a very tactful gesture on his part; for he ushered them into the same private dining-room as before, the room used by the Murder Club. He noticed that they seemed to eat rather from a sense of duty than any appreciation of the menu.

He did not se that their looks were even stranger afterwards, when they sat round the table.

“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 minds back to last nigh 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 Sr 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.”

Dr. Fell looked at Miles.

“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 Brook 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.