John Carr - He Who Whispers

“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 Brook, 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.

“Mademoiselle,” 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 occasion? 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 around 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 face 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' arm.

“Maybe it would be better,” she suggested, “if we let Dr. Fell tell it 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 I 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 around 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 around 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 today. 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 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 sharply 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 t. She does not se 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 . . .”