He Who Whispers Read online

  ‘Hammond?’ repeated the other. Interest and suspicion quickened in his eye. ‘You are not Sir Charles Hammond?’

  ‘No. Sir Charles Hammond was my uncle. He …’

  ‘Ah, but of course!’ Professor Rigaud snapped his fingers. ‘Sir Charles Hammond is dead. Yes, yes, yes! I read of this in the newspapers. You have a sister. You and your sister have inherited the library.’

  Barbara Morell, Miles noticed, was looking more than a little perplexed.

  ‘My uncle,’ he said to her, ‘was a historian. He lived for years in a little house in the New Forest, accumulating thousands of books piled up in the wildest and craziest disorder. As a matter of fact, my main reason for coming to London was to see whether I couldn’t get a trained librarian to put the books in order. But Dr Fell invited me to the Murder Club …’

  ‘The library!’ breathed Professor Rigaud. ‘The library!’

  A strong inner excitement seemed to kindle and expand inside him like steam, making his chest swell and his complexion a trifle more purplish.

  ‘That man Hammond,’ he declared with enthusiasm, ‘was a great man! He was curious! He was alert! He’ – Professor Rigaud twisted his wrist, as one who turns a key – ‘pried into things! To examine his library I would give much. To examine his library I would give … But I forgot. I am furious.’ He clapped on his hat. ‘I will go now.’

  ‘Professor Rigaud,’ the girl called softly.

  Miles Hammond, always sensitive to atmospheres, was conscious of a slight shock. For some reason there had been a subtle change in the attitude of both his companions, or so it seemed to him, ever since he had mentioned his uncle’s house in the New Forest. He could not analyse this; perhaps he had imagined it.

  But when Barbara Morell suddenly clenched her hands and called out, there could be no doubt about the desperate urgency in her tone.

  ‘Professor Rigaud! Please! Couldn’t we – couldn’t we hold the meeting of the Murder Club after all?’

  Rigaud swung round.

  ‘Mademoiselle?’

  ‘They’ve treated you badly. I know that.’ She hurried forward. The half-smile on her lips contrasted with the appeal in the eyes. ‘But I’ve looked forward so much to coming here! This case he was going to talk about’ – briefly, she appealed to Miles – ‘was rather special and sensational. It happened in France just before the war, and Professor Rigaud is one of the few remaining people who know anything about it. It’s all about …’

  ‘It is about,’ said Professor Rigaud, ‘the influence of a certain woman on human lives.’

  ‘Mr Hammond and I would make an awfully good audience. And we wouldn’t breathe a word to the press, either of us! And after all, you know, we’ve got to dine somewhere; and I doubt whether we could get anything at all to eat if we left here. Couldn’t we, Professor Rigaud? Couldn’t we? Couldn’t we?’

  Frédéric the head-waiter, dispirited and angry and sorry, slipped unobtrusively through the half-opened door to the hall, making a flicking motion of the fingers to someone who hovered outside.

  ‘Dinner is served,’ he said.

  CHAPTER 2

  THE story told to them by Georges Antoine Rigaud – over the coffee, following an indifferent dinner – Miles Hammond was at first inclined to dismiss as a fable, a dream, an elaborate leg-pull. This was partly because of Professor Rigaud’s expression: one of portentous French solemnity, shooting little glances from one of his companions to the other, yet with a huge sardonic amusement behind everything he said.

  Afterwards, of course, Miles discovered that every word was true. But by that time …

  It was muffled and quiet in the little dining-room, with the four tall candles burning on the table as its only light. They had drawn back the curtains and opened the windows, to let in a little air on that stuffy night. Outside the rain still splashed, against a purplish dusk spotted with one or two lighted windows in the red-painted restaurant across the street.

  It formed a fitting background for what they were about to hear.

  ‘Crime and the occult!’ Professor Rigaud had declared, flourishing his knife and fork. ‘These are the only hobbies for a man of taste!’ He looked very hard at Barbara Morell. ‘You collect, mademoiselle?’

  An eddying breeze, moist-scented, curled in through the open windows and made the candle-flames undulate. Moveing shadows were thrown across the girl’s face.

  ‘Collect?’ she repeated.

  ‘Criminal relics?’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’

  ‘There is a man in Edinburgh,’ said Professor Rigaud rather wistfully, ‘who has a pen-wiper made of human skin, from the body of Burke, the body-snatcher. Do I shock you? But as God is my judge’ – suddenly he chuckled, showing his gold tooth, and then became very serious again – ‘I could name you a lady, a very charming lady like yourself, who stole the headstone from the grave of Dougal, the Moat Farm murderer, at Chelmsford Prison; and has the headstone set up in her garden now.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Miles. ‘But do all students of crime … well, carry on like that?’

  Professor Rigaud considered this.

  ‘It is a blague, yes,’ he conceded. ‘But all the same it is amusing. As for myself, I will show you presently.’

  He said no more until the table was cleared and the coffee poured. Then, lighting a cigar with concentration, he hitched his chair forward and put his thick elbows on the table. His cane, of polished yellow wood which shone under the candle-light, was propped against his leg.

  ‘Outside the little city of Chartres, which is some sixty-odd kilometres south of Paris, there lived in the year nineteen-thirty-nine a certain English family. You are perhaps familiar with Chartres?

  ‘One thinks of the place as medieval, as all black stone and a dream of the past, and in a sense that is true. You see it in the distance, on a hill, amid miles of yellow grain-fields, with the unequal towers of the Cathedral rising up. You enter through the round-towers of the Porte Guillaume, where geese and chickens fly in front of your motor-car, and go up steep little cobbled streets to the Hotel of the Grand Monarch.

  ‘At the foot of the hill winds the River Eure, with the old walls of the fortifications overhanging it, and willows drooping into the water. You see people walking on these walls, in the cool of the evening, where the peach-trees grow.

  ‘On market-days – ouf! The noise of cattle is like the devil blowing horns. There are absurdities to buy, at lines of stalls where the vendors sound as loud as the cattle. There are’ – Professor Rigaud hesitated slightly – ‘superstitions here, as much a part of the soil as moss on rock. You eat the best bread in France, you drink good wine. And you say to yourself, “Ah! This is the place to settle down and write a book.”

  ‘But there are industries here: milling, and iron-founding, and stained-glass, and leather manufacture, and others I do not investigate because they bore me. I mention them because the largest of the leather manufactories, Pelletier et Cie., was owned by an Englishman. Mr Howard Brooke.

  ‘Mr Brooke is fifty years old, and his happy wife is perhaps five years younger. They have one son, Harry, in his middle twenties. All are dead now, so I may speak of them freely.’

  A slight chill – Miles Hammond could not have said why – passed through the little dining-room.

  Barbara Morell, who was smoking a cigarette and watching Rigaud in a curious way from behind it, stirred in her chair.

  ‘Dead?’ she repeated. ‘Then no more harm can be done by …’

  Professor Rigaud ignored this.

  ‘They live, I repeat, a little way outside Chartres. They live in a villa – grandiosely called a château, though it is not – on the very bank of the river. Here the Eure is narrow, and still, and dark green with the reflexion of its banks. Let us see, now!’

  Bustling with concentration, he pushed forward his coffee-cup.

  ‘This,’ he announced, ‘is the villa, built of grey stone round three sides of a courtyard. This’
– dipping his finger into the dregs of a glass of claret, Professor Rigaud drew a curved line on the tablecloth – ‘this is the river, winding past in front of it.

  ‘Up here, some two hundred yards northwards from the house, is an arched stone bridge over the river. It is a private bridge; Mr Brooke owns the land on either side of the Eure. And still farther along from there, but on the opposite bank of the river from the house, stands an old ruined tower.

  ‘This tower is locally known as la Tour d’Henri Quatre, the tower of Henry the Fourth, for absolutely no reason relating to that king. It was once a part of a château, burnt down by the Huguenots when they attacked Chartres towards the end of the sixteenth century. Only the tower remains: round, stone-built, its wooden floors burnt out, so that inside it is only a shell with a stone staircase climbing spirally up the wall to a flat stone roof with a parapet.

  ‘The tower – observe! – cannot be seen from this villa where the Brooke family live. But the prospect is pretty, pretty, pretty!

  ‘You walk northwards, through thick grass, past the willows, along the river-bank where it curves here. First there is the stone bridge, mirrored in a glitter of water. Farther on is the tower, overhanging the moss-green bank, round and grey-black with vertical window-slits, perhaps forty feet high, and framed against a distant line of poplars. It is used by the Brooke family as a kind of bathing-hut, to change clothes when they go for a swim.

  ‘So this English family – Mr Howard the father, Mrs Georgina the mother, Mr Harry the son – live in their comfortable villa, happily and perhaps a little stodgily. Until …’

  ‘Until?’ prompted Miles, as Professor Rigaud paused.

  ‘Until a certain woman arrives.’

  Professor Rigaud was silent for a moment.

  Then, exhaling his breath, he shrugged the thick shoulders as though disclaiming any responsibility.

  ‘Myself,’ he went on, ‘I arrive in Chartres in May of thirty-nine. I have just finished my Life of Cagliostro, and I wish for peace and quiet. My good friend Coco Legrand, the photographer, introduces me to Mr Howard Brooke one day on the steps of the hôtel de ville. We are different types, but we like each other. He smiles at my Frenchness, I smile at his Englishness; and so everybody is happy.

  ‘Mr Brooke is grey-haired, upright, reserved but friendly, a hardworking executive at his leather business. He wears plus-fours, which seem as strange in Chartres as a curé’s skirts in Newcastle. He is hospitable, he has a twinkle in the eye, but he is so conventional you can bet your shilling on exactly what he will do or say at any time. His wife, a plump, pretty, red-faced woman, is much the same.

  ‘But the son Harry …

  ‘Ah! There is a different person!

  ‘This Harry interested me. He has sensitiveness, he has imagination. In height and weight and way of carrying himself he is much like his father. But under that correct outside of his, he is all wires and all nerves.

  ‘He is a good-looking young fellow, too: square jaw, straight nose, good wide-spaced brown eyes, and fair hair that (I think to myself) will be grey like his father’s if he does not control his nerves. Harry is the idol of both his parents. I tell you I have seen doting fathers and mothers, but never any like those two!

  ‘Because Harry can swipe a golf-ball two hundred yards, or two hundred miles, or whatever is the asinine distance, Mr Brooke is purple with pride. Because Harry plays tennis like a maniac in the hot sun, and has a row of silver cups, his father is in the seventh heaven. He does not mention this to Harry. He only says, “Not bad, not bad.” But he brags about it interminably to anybody who will listen.

  ‘Harry is being trained in the leather business. He will inherit the factory one day; he will be a very rich man like his father. He is sensible; he knows his duty. And yet this boy wants to go to Paris and study painting.

  ‘My God, how he wants it! He wants it so much he is inarticulate. Mr Brooke is gently firm with this nonsense about becoming a painter. He is broad-minded, he says; painting is all very well as a hobby; but as a serious occupation – really, now! As for Mrs Brooke, she is almost hysterical on the subject, since the impression in her mind is that Harry will live in an attic among beautiful girls without any clothes on.

  ‘ “My boy,” says the father, “I understand exactly how you feel. I went through a similar phase at your age. But in ten years’ time you will laugh at this.”

  ‘ “After all,” says the mother, “couldn’t you always stay at home and paint animals?”

  ‘After which Harry goes out blindly and hits a tennis-ball so hard he blows his opponent off the court, or sits on the lawn with a white-faced, brooding, swearing look. These people are all so honest, so well-meaning, so thoroughly sincere!

  ‘I never learned, I tell you now, whether Harry was serious about his life’s work. I never had the opportunity to learn. For, in late May of that year, Mr Brooke’s personal secretary – a hard-faced, middle-aged woman named Mrs McShane – grows alarmed at the international situation and returns to England.

  ‘Now that was serious. Mr Brooke’s private correspondence – his personal secretary has no connexion with the work at the office – is enormous. Ouf! Often it made my head swim, how that man wrote letters! His investments, his charities, his friends, his letters to the newspapers in England: he would pace up and down as he dictated, his hands behind his back, grey-haired and bony-faced, with a look of stern moral indignation about his mouth.

  ‘As a personal secretary he must have the very best. He wrote to England for the best. And there arrived at Beauregard – that is what the Brookes called their house – there arrived at Beauregard, Miss Fay Seton.

  ‘Miss Fay Seton …

  ‘It was on the afternoon of the thirtieth of May, I remember. I was taking tea with the Brookes. Here was Beauregard, a grey stone house of the early eighteenth century, with stone faces carved on the walls and white-painted window-frames, built round three sides of a front courtyard. We were sitting in the court, which is paved with smooth grass, having tea in the shadow of the house.

  ‘In front of us was the fourth wall, pierced by big iron-grilled gates that stood open. Beyond these gates lay the road that ran past, and beyond this a long grassy bank sloping down to the river fringed with willows.

  ‘Papa Brooke sits in a wicker chair, his shell-rimmed spectacles on his nose, grinning as he holds out a piece of biscuit for the dog. In English households there is always a dog. To the English it is a source of perpetual astonishment and delight that a dog has sense enough to sit up and ask for food.

  ‘However!

  ‘There is Papa Brooke, and the dog is a dark-grey Scotch terrier like an animated wire brush. On the other side of the tea-table sits Mama Brooke – with brown bobbed hair, pleasant and ruddy of face, not very smartly dressed – pouring out a fifth cup of tea. At one side stands Harry, in a sports-coat and flannels, practising golf-strokes with a driver against an imaginary ball.

  ‘The tops of the trees faintly moving – a French summer! – and the noise of the leaves rippling and rustling, and the sun that winks on them, and fragrance of grass and flowers, and all the drowsy peacefulness – it makes you close your eyes even to think of …

  ‘That was when a Citroën taxi rolled up outside the front gates.

  ‘A young woman got out of the taxi, and paid the driver so generously that he followed her in with her luggage. She walked up the path towards us, diffidently. She said her name was Miss Fay Seton, and that she was the new secretary.

  ‘Attractive? Grand ciel!

  ‘Please to remember – you will excuse my admonitory fore-finger – please to remember, however, that I was not conscious of this full attractiveness at first, or all at once. No. For she had the quality, then and always, of being unobtrusive.

  ‘I remember her standing in the path on that first day, while Papa Brooke punctiliously introduced her to everybody including the dog, and Mama Brooke asked her whether she wanted to go upstairs and wash. She w
as rather tall, and soft and slender, wearing some tailored costume that was unobtrusive too. Her neck was slender; she had heavy, smooth, dark-red hair; her eyes were long and blue and dreaming, with a smile in them, though they seldom seemed to look at you directly.

  ‘Harry Brooke did not say anything. But he took another swing at an imaginary golf-ball, so that there was a swish and a whick as the clubhead flicked cropped grass.

  ‘So I smoked my cigar – being always, always, always violently curious about human behaviour – and I said to myself, “Aha!”

  ‘For this young woman grew on you. It was odd and perhaps a bit weird. Her spiritual good looks, her soft movements, above all her extraordinary aloofness …

  ‘Fay Seton was, in every sense of your term, a lady: though she seemed rather to conceal this and be frightened of it. She came of a very good family, old impoverished stock in Scotland, and Mr Brooke discovered this and it impressed him powerfully. She had not been trained as a secretary; no, she had been trained as something else.’ Professor Rigaud chuckled and eyed his auditors keenly. ‘But she was quick and efficient, and deft and cool-looking. If they wanted a fourth at bridge, or someone to sing and play at the piano when the lamps were lighted in the evening, Fay Seton would oblige. In her way she was friendly, though shy and somewhat prudish, and she would often sit looking into the distance, far away. And you thought to yourself, in exasperation: what is this girl thinking about?

  ‘That blazing hot summer …!

  ‘When the very water of the river seemed thick and turgid under the sun, and there was a wiry hum of crickets after nightfall: I am never likely to forget it, now.

  ‘Like a sensible person Fay Seton did not indulge much in athletics, but this was really because she had a weak heart. I told you of the stone bridge, and of the ruined tower they used as a bathing-hut when they went for a swim. Once or twice only she went for a swim – tall and slender, her red hair done up under a rubber cap; exquisite! – with Harry Brooke encouraging her. He rowed her on the river, he took her to the cinema to hear MM. Laurel and Hardy speaking perfect French, he walked with her in those dangerous romantic groves of Eure-et-Loir.