He Who Whispers Page 16

  ‘Go on!’

  She swallowed hard.

  ‘About the middle of August in that year, I remember Jim with his beard suddenly getting up from the breakfast table with a letter in his hand and saying, “My God, the old man’s been murdered.” He referred once or twice to the Brooke case, and tried to find out all he could from anything that was published in the English newspapers. But afterwards you couldn’t get him to say a word about it.

  ‘Then the war. Jim was reported dead in forty-two; we believed he was dead. I – I went through his papers. I came across this awful story spread out from letter to letter. Of course there wasn’t anything I could do. There wasn’t much I could even learn, except a few scanty things in the back files of the papers: that Mr Brooke had been stabbed and the police rather thought Miss Fay Seton had killed him.

  ‘It was only in this last week … Things never do come singly, do they? They always heap up on you all at once!’

  ‘Yes. I can testify to that.’

  ‘Warren Street!’

  ‘A press photograph came into the office, showing three Englishwomen who were returning from France, and one of them was, “Miss Fay Seton, whose peacetime profession is that of librarian”. And a man at the office happened to tell me all about the famous Murder Club, and said that the speaker on Friday night was to be Professor Rigaud, giving an eyewitness account of the Brooke case.’

  There were tears in Barbara’s eyes now.

  ‘Professor Rigaud loathes journalists. He wouldn’t ever before speak at the Murder Club, even, because he was afraid they’d bring in the press. I couldn’t go to him in private unless I produced my bundle of letters to explain why I was interested; and I couldn’t – do you understand that? – I couldn’t have Jim’s name mixed up in this if something dreadful came out of it. So I …’

  ‘You tried to get Rigaud to yourself at Beltring’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She nodded quickly, and then stared out of the window.

  ‘When you mentioned that you were looking for a librarian, it did occur to me, “Oh, Lord! Suppose …?” You know what I mean?’

  ‘Yes.’ Miles nodded. ‘I follow you.’

  ‘You were so fascinated by that coloured photograph, so much under its spell, that I thought to myself, “Suppose I confide him? If he wants to find a librarian, suppose I ask him to find Fay Seton and tell her there’s someone who knows she’s been the victim of a filthy frame-up? It’s possible he’ll meet her in any case; but suppose I ask him to find her?”’

  ‘And why didn’t you confide in me?’

  Barbara’s fingers twisted round her handbag.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She shook her head rapidly. ‘As I said to you at the time, it was only a silly idea of mine. And maybe I resented it, a little, that you were so obviously smitten.’

  ‘But, look here! –’

  Barbara flung this away and rushed on.

  ‘But the main thing was: what could you or I actually do for her? Apparently they didn’t believe she was guilty of murder, and that was the main thing. She’d been the victim of enough foul lying stories to poison anyone’s life, but you can’t un-ruin a reputation. Even if I weren’t such a coward, how could I help? I told you, the last thing I said before I jumped out of that taxi, I don’t see how I can be of any use now!’

  ‘The letters don’t contain any information about the murder of Mr Brooke, then?’

  ‘No! Look here!’

  Winking to keep back tears, her face flushed and her ash-blonde head bent forward, Barbara fumbled inside the hand-bag. She held out four folded sheets of notepaper closely written.

  ‘This,’ she said, ‘is the last letter Harry Brooke ever wrote to Jim. He was writing it on the afternoon of the murder. First it goes on – gloating! – over the success of his scheme to blacken Fay and get what he wanted. Then it breaks off suddenly. Look at the end bit!’

  ‘Euston!’

  Miles dropped the key-ring back in his pocket and took the letter. The end, done in a violent agitated scrawl for an afterthought, was headed, ‘6.45 p.m.’ Its words danced in front of Miles’s eyes as the train quivered and roared.

  JIM, something terrible has just happened. Somebody’s killed Dad. Rigaud and I left him on the tower, and somebody went up and stabbed him. Must get this in the post quickly to ask you for God’s sake, old man, don’t ever tell anybody what I’ve been writing to you. If Fay went scatty and killed the old boy because he tried to buy her off, I won’t want anybody to know I’ve been putting out reports about her. It wouldn’t look right and besides I didn’t want anything like this to happen. Please, old man. Yours in haste, H. B.

  So much raw, unpleasant human nature cried out of that letter, Miles thought, that it was as though he could see the man writing it.

  Miles stared straight ahead, lost now to everything.

  Rage against Harry Brooke clouded his mind; it maddened him and weakened him. To think he never suspected anything in the character of Harry Brooke … and yet, obscurely, hadn’t he? Professor Rigaud had been wrong in estimating this pleasant young man’s motives. Yet Rigaud had drawn, sharply drawn, a picture of nerves and instability. Miles himself had once used the word neurotic to describe him.

  Harry Brooke had coolly and deliberately, to get his own way, invented the whole damned …

  But, if Miles had ever doubted whether he himself was in love with Fay Seton, he doubted no longer.

  The thought of Fay, completely innocent, sick with bewilderment and fright, was one that neither the heart nor the imagination could resist. He cursed himself for ever having doubts of any kind about her. He had been seeing everything through distorted spectacles; he had been wondering, almost with a sense of repulsion mixed with the attraction he felt for her, what power of evil might lie behind the blue eyes. And yet all the time …

  ‘She isn’t guilty,’ Miles said. ‘She isn’t guilty of anything.’

  ‘That’s right’

  ‘I tell you what Fay feels about herself. And don’t think I’m making exaggerated or melodramatic statements when I say so. She feels that she’s damned.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘I don’t think it. I know it.’ Intense conviction seized him. That’s what was in her whole behaviour last night. Rightly or wrongly, she feels that she can’t get away from something, and that she’s damned, I don’t pretend to explain what’s been going on, but I know that much.

  ‘What’s more, she’s in danger. Something would happen, Dr Fell said, if she tried to carry out her plans. That’s why he said I must catch her at any cost and not lose touch with her for a moment. He said it was a matter of life and death. And, so help me, that’s what I’m going to do! We owe her that much, after all she’s been through. The very split-second we get out of this train …’

  Miles stopped.

  Some inner ear, some faint consciousness still alert, had just rung a warning. It warned him that, for the first time since he entered this Underground train, the train had come to a stop before he remembered hearing it stop.

  Then, with the bright image of the car leaping out at him, he heard a sound which galvanized him. It was the soft, rolling rumble of the doors as they started to close.

  ‘Miles!’ cried Barbara – and woke up at exactly the same moment.

  The doors closed with a soft bump. The guard’s bell-push tinkled Miles, springing up to stare out of the window as the train glided on again, saw the words of the station-sign glaring out at him with white letters on a blue ground, and the words were ‘Camden Town’.

  He was afterwards told that he shouted something to the guard, but he did not realize this at the time. He only remembered plunging frantically at the doors, wrenching to get his fingers into the joining and tear them open. Someone said, ‘Take it easy, mate!’ The Australian soldier woke up. The policeman, interested, got to his feet.

  It was no good.

  As the train whipped past the platform, gath
ering speed, Miles stood with his face against the glass of the doors.

  Half a dozen persons straggled towards the way out. Dingy overhead lights swung with the wind which billowed through this stale-smelling cavern. He clearly saw Fay – in an open tweed coat and black beret, with the same blank, miserable, tortured look on her face – walking towards the way out as the train bore him past into the tunnel.

  CHAPTER 16

  UNDER a very dark sky, drizzling, the rain splashed into Bolsover Place, Camden Town.

  Off the broad stretch of Camden High Street at no great distance from the Underground station, even off the narrow dinginess of Bolsover Street, this was a cul-de-sac seen under a brick arch.

  Its surface was of uneven paving-stones now black with rain. Straight ahead were two blitzed houses, looking like ordinary houses until you noticed the state of the windows. On the right was a smallish factory or warehouse bearing the legend, ‘J. Mings & Co. Ltd., Artificial Dentures’. On the left lay first a small one-story front, boarded up, whose sign said that it had once served suppers. Next to this were two houses, brick-built of that indeterminate colour between grey and brown, with some glass in their windows and an air not entirely of decay.

  Nothing stirred there, not even a stray cat. Miles, heedless of the fact that the rain was soaking him through, gripped Barbara’s arm.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Barbara muttered, moving her shoulders under the mackintosh, and holding her umbrella crookedly. ‘We haven’t lost ten minutes.’

  ‘No. But we have lost that time.’

  Miles knew that she was frightened now. On the way back, where at least they had been able to step instantly into a train going in the other direction at Chalk Farm, he had been pouring out the story of last night’s events. It was plain that Barbara no more knew what to make of it than he did; but she was afraid.

  ‘Number Five,’ said Miles. ‘Number Five.’

  It was the last house down on the left, at right angles with the two blitzed houses. Miles noticed something else as he led Barbara over the uneven paving-stones. In a large grimy display-window on the premises of J. Mings & Co. Ltd. was a very large set of artificial teeth.

  As an advertising display they might have been considered gruesome or comic, but had they been in a better state of repair they could not have failed to attract attention. Made of metal painted in naturalistic colours as to teeth and gums, loomed there close-shut and disembodied, a giant’s teeth in the faint grey light. Miles didn’t like them. He felt their presence behind him as he went up to the blistered door of Number Five, on which there was a knocker.

  But his hand never reached the knocker.

  Instantly a woman’s head appeared at the open ground-floor window of the house next door, moving aside what once might have been a lace curtain. She was a middle-aged woman who looked at the newcomers avidly; not at all in suspicion, but with pervading curiosity.

  ‘Miss Fay Seton?’ said Miles.

  The woman turned round towards the room behind her, evidently to kick at something, before she replied. Then she nodded towards Number Five.

  ‘First-floor-up-left-front.’

  ‘I – er – just walk in?’

  ‘’Ow else?’

  ‘I see. Thank you.’

  The woman gravely inclined her head in acknowledgement of this, and just as gravely withdrew. Miles turned the knob of the door and opened it. He motioned Barbara ahead of him into a passage with a staircase. The stale mildewy air of the passage went over them in a wave. When Miles closed the door it was so dark that they could barely make out the outline of the stairs. Distantly he could hear rain pattering on a sky-light.

  ‘I don’t like it.’ Barbara spoke under her breath. ‘Why ever does she want to live in a place like this?’

  ‘You know what it is in London nowadays. You can’t get anything anywhere for love or money.’

  ‘But why did she keep the room after she’d gone to Greywood?’

  Miles wondered that himself. He didn’t like the place either. He wanted to shout Fay’s name, to be assured she was here after all.

  ‘First-floor-up-left-front,’ said Miles. ‘Mind the stairs!’

  It was a steep staircase, which turned round a steep bend into a narrow passage leading towards the front of the house. At the end of this passage was a window, one of its panes mended with cardboard, which looked down into Bolsover Place. It admitted enough light to show them a closed door on each side of the passage. A few seconds later, when Miles had started for the left-hand door, it admitted still more light as well.

  A fairly bright glow sprang up outside that front window, half kindling the little passage with its black linoleum. Miles, his heart in his mouth, had just raised a hand to knock at the left-hand door when the light startled him like an interruption. It startled Barbara too; he heard her heel scrape on the linoleum. Both of them glanced out of the window.

  The teeth were moving.

  Across the way, in the premises of Messrs J. Mings & Co., a bored caretaker was amusing a Sunday afternoon by switching on a light in the grimy window and setting in motion the electric mechanism which controlled the set of teeth.

  Very slowly they opened, very slowly they closed: endlessly opening and closing to catch your eye. Grimy and evil-looking in disuse, sometimes sticking a little, the pink gums and partly darkened teeth gaped wide and shut again. They had an effect at once theatrical and horribly real. They were soundless and inhuman. Through the window, blurred with rain, they reared a shadow of themselves – slowly, very slowly opening and closing – on the wall of the passage.

  Barbara said softly:

  Of all the …!’

  ‘Sh-h!’

  Miles could not have said why he called for silence; to him-self he seemed occupied with the reflexion that the display opposite was damned poor advertising and not very funny. He lifted his hand again, and knocked at the door.

  ‘Yes?’ called a calm voice, after a very slight pause.

  It was Fay’s voice. She was all right.

  Miles stood motionless for a second or two, watching out of the corner of his eye that blurred shadow moving on the wall, before he turned the knob. The door was not locked. He opened it.

  Fay Seton, still in the tweed coat over her dove-grey dress, stood in front of a chest of drawers looking round inquiringly. Her expression was placid, not even very interested, until she saw who the newcomer was. Then she gave a smothered cry.

  He could see every detail of the room clearly, since the curtains were drawn and the light was burning. A dim bulb hanging over the chest of drawers showed him the rather broken-down bedroom furniture, the discoloured wall-paper, the frayed carpet. A heavy tin box, painted black and half as big as a trunk, had been hastily drawn out from under the bed; its lid was not quite shut, and a small padlock hung open from the hasp.

  Fay’s voice went shrilling up.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I followed you! I was told to follow you I You’re in danger! There’s –’

  Miles took two steps into the room.

  ‘I’m afraid you startled me,’ said Fay, controlling herself. One hand went under her heart, a gesture he had seen her make before. She gave a little laugh. ‘I didn’t expect –! After all –!’ Then, quickly: ‘Who’s that with you?’

  ‘This is Miss Morell. The sister of – well, of Jim Morell. She wants very much to meet you. She …’

  Then Miles saw what was on top of the chest of drawers, and everything in existence seemed to stop.

  First he saw an old brief-case of black leather, dried and dusty and cracked, bulging from something inside; its straps were loosened, and the flap was partly opened. But an old brief-case may belong to anyone. Beside it lay a large, flat packet of banknotes, the topmost one showing the denomination of twenty pounds. The colour of the banknotes might once have been white; they had now a dry blurred, smeary appearance, and were stained in dry patches of rust-brown.

  Fay�
��s pale face was paler yet as she saw the direction of his glance. It seemed very difficult for her to draw breath.

  ‘Yes,’ she told him. ‘Those are bloodstains. Mr Brooke’s blood, you see, got on them when they …’

  ‘For the love of God, Fay!’

  ‘I’m not needed here,’ Barbara’s voice spoke frantically, but not loudly. ‘I didn’t really want to come. But Miles …’

  ‘Please do come in,’ Fay said in her gentle voice, while the blue eyes kept roving and roving as though she scarcely saw him ‘And close the door.’

  Yet she was not calm. This apparent case was the effect of sheer despair, or of some emotion akin to it. Miles’s head was spinning. He carefully closed the door, to get even a few seconds in which to think. Gently he put his hand on Barbara’s shoulder, for Barbara was on the point of running out of the room. He looked round the bedroom, feeling its close air stifle him.

  Then he found his voice.

  ‘But you can’t be guilty after all!’ he said with desperate reasonableness. It seemed vitally important to convince Fay, logically, that she couldn’t be guilty. ‘I tell you, it’s impossible! It’s … Listen!’

  ‘Yes?’ said Fay.

  Beside the chest of drawers there was an old armchair with patches of its back and arms frayed to threads. Fay sank down into it, her shoulders drooping. Though her expression hardly changed, the tears welled out of her eyes and ran unheeded down her cheeks. He had never seen her cry before, and this was worse than anything else.

  ‘We know now,’ said Miles, feeling numb, ‘that you weren’t guilty of anything at all. I’ve, heard … I’ve just heard, I tell you! … that all those accusations against you were a fake deliberately trumped up by Harry Brooke –’

  Fay raised her head quickly.

  ‘So you know that,’ she said.

  ‘What’s more’ – he suddenly realized something else, and stood back and pointed his finger at her– ‘you knew it too! You knew they were trumped up by Harry Brooke! You’ve known it all along!’