He Who Whispers (12 page)

Miles led the way round to the east side, through the reception-hall which housed his uncle's little collection of medieval arms, and into the long sitting-room. This sitting-room was a pleasant place of tapestry chairs, low, white-painted bookshelves, and a small Leonardo in oils above the mantelpiece. Only one lamp burned there as a night-light, with a very tiny flame which made immense shadows; but Miles had no wish to make it brighter.

In the hush of the New Forest at past midnight, he swung round.

‘I think I ought to tell you,' he said in a louder voice than was necessary, ‘that I've already had a long talk with Miss Seton …'

Professor Rigaud stopped short. ‘
She told you
!'

(Steady, now! No reason at all to have a lump in your throat or a furiously hammering heart!)

‘She told me about the facts of Mr Brooke's death, yes. The police eventually decided it was suicide, because only Mr Brooke's fingerprints were on the handle of the swords-tick. Is that true?'

‘It is.'

‘And, at the time of – at the time it happened, Fay Seton had gone for a swim in the river some distance away from the tower. Is
that
true?'

‘As far as it goes,' Professor Rigaud nodded, ‘yes. But did she tell you about the young man Pierre Fresnac? The son of Jules Fresnac?'

‘Need we,' Miles almost shouted, ‘need we be so infernally censorious nowadays? After all! If there did happen to be anything between this young man Fresnac and Fay Seton …'

‘The English!' breathed Professor Rigaud in a tone of awe. And then, after a pause: ‘My God, the English!'

He stood staring back in a light so dim as to take away expression, with Dr Fell's big shape behind him. He propped the yellow sword-cane against the arm of a tapestry chair, and removed his hat. There was something in the tone of his voice, not a loud voice, which twitched along Miles's nerves.

‘You are like Howard Brooke,' breathed Professor Rigaud. ‘I say one thing, and you think I mean only …'

Again he paused.

‘Do you think it likely, young man,' he went on with a sort of pounce, ‘that a peasant farmer of Eure-et-Loir would care two sous, would care
that
,' he snapped his fingers, ‘about a little affair of the passions between his son and a lady of the district? It would only amuse him, if in fact he noticed it at all. It would not, I assure you, start the thunder-storm which swept with terror every peasant in that district. It would not make Jules Fresnac throw a stone at the woman in a public road.'

‘What
was
it, then?'

‘Can you cast your mind back to the days just before Howard Brooke's death?'

‘I can.'

‘This young man, Pierre Fresnac, lived with his parents in a stone farm-house off the road between Chartres and Le Mans.

It is necessary to emphasize that his bedroom was in an attic up three flights of stairs.'

‘Well?'

‘For some days Pierre Fresnac had been ill, had been weak, had been dazed. Partly because he dared not speak, partly because he did not understand and thought it was all a night-mare, he said nothing to anyone. Like all young people, he was frightened of being thrashed for something that was not his fault. So he bound a scarf round his neck and said not a word.

‘He thought it was a dream when he saw, night after night, the white face floating outside the upstairs window. He thought it was a dream when he saw the body taking form in the air metres above ground, and felt the anaesthesia that dims the mind and muscles as that lamp is dimmed when you turn down the wick. It was his father, presently, who tore away the bandage from the throat. And they found the sharp teeth-marks in the neck where the life-blood had been drained away.'

In the pause that followed, with a sort of wild patience, Miles Hammond waited for someone to laugh.

He waited for this emptiness to be broken. He waited for Rigaud to throw back his head and utter that chuckle which showed a gold tooth. He waited for the Gargantuan chuckle of Dr Fell. And nothing happened. No one as much as smiled, or asked him how he liked the joke. What struck his wits numb, what held him in a kind of paralysis, was the uttering of those solid flat police-court-like words, ‘the sharp teeth-marks in the neck where the life-blood had been drained away.'

As though from a distance Miles heard his own voice.

‘Are you crazy?'

‘No.'

‘You mean –?'

‘Yes,' said Professor Rigaud. ‘I mean the vampire. I mean the un-dead. I mean the drainer of bodies and killer of souls.'

The white face floating in the air outside the upstairs window.

The white face floating in the air outside the upstairs window
…

In spite of himself Miles couldn't laugh. He tried to do so, but the sound stuck in his throat.

‘The good simple-minded Mr Howard Brooke,' said Professor Rigaud, ‘understood nothing of this.
He
saw in it only a vulgar intrigue between a peasant lad and a woman older than the boy. He was shocked to the very depths of his British soul. He had the simple conviction that any immoral woman can be bought off with money. And so …'

‘And so?'

‘He died. That is all.'

Professor Rigaud shook his bald head, in a very fever and passion of earnestness. He picked up the sword-cane, clutching it under his arm.

‘I tried last night … alas for my idiotic sense of humour! … to tease you with a puzzle. I stated facts quite fairly, if obliquely. I told you that this woman was not, in the accepted sense, a criminal of any kind. I told you truly that in the workaday world she is gentle and even prudish.

‘But this does not apply to the soul inside, which she can no more help than I can help greed or inquisitiveness. It does not apply to the soul which can leave the body in trance or sleep, and take form visible to the eye. That soul, like the white face at the upstairs window, feeds on and draws life from the blood of the living.

‘If Howard Brooke had told me any of this beforehand, I could have helped him. But no, no, no! This woman is immoral; this must be kept quiet. Perhaps I should have guessed for myself, from the outward signs and from the story I gave you. The physical characteristics, the red hair and the slender figure and the blue eyes, are always in folklore associated with the vampire because in folklore they are signs of eroticism. But as usual I do not recognize what is under my nose. I am left to learn it after Howard Brooke's death, from a mob of peasants who wish to lynch her.'

Miles passed a hand across his forehead and pressed hard.

‘But you can't seriously mean this! You can't mean it was this … this …'

‘This thing,' supplied Professor Rigaud.

‘This person, let's say. You tell me that Fay Seton killed Howard Brooke?'

‘The vampire did. Because the vampire hated him.'

‘It was plain murder with a sharp sword-blade! No supernatural agency is involved!'

‘How then,' asked Professor Rigaud coolly, ‘did the murderer approach and leave his victim?'

Again there was a long silence.

‘Listen, my good friend!' cried Miles. ‘I tell you again, you can't seriously mean this! You, a practical man, can't put forward as an explanation this superstitious …'

‘No, no, no!' said Professor Rigaud with three separate words like hammer-blows, and suddenly snapped his fingers in the air.

‘How do you mean, no?'

‘I mean,' returned Professor Rigaud, ‘it is an argument I often have with my academic colleagues about the word “superstitious”. Can you dispute the facts I present?'

‘Apparently not.'

‘
Justement
! And supposing – I say supposing! – any such creature as a vampire to exist, do you agree that it may explain Fay Seton's every action while she lived with the Brooke family?'

‘But look here – !'

‘I say to you,' Professor Rigaud's little eye gleamed in a sort of logical frenzy, ‘I say to you: “Here are certain facts; please to explain them.” Facts, facts, facts! You reply to me that you cannot explain them, but that I must not – must not, must not! – talk such superstitious nonsense, because the thing I suggest upsets your universe and makes you afraid. You may be right in saying so. You may be wrong in saying so. But it is I who am practical and you who are superstitious.'

He peered round at Dr Fell.

‘
You
agree, dear doctor?'

Dr Fell had been standing over against the low line of the white-painted bookshelves, his arms folded under his long box-pleated cape, and his eyes fixed with absent-minded absorption on the dim flame of the lamp. Miles was assured of his presence by a gentle wheezing of breath, with occasional snorts and stoppages as though the doctor had suddenly waked out of a half-dream, and by the flutter of the broad black eyeglass-ribbon when his chest rose and fell.

His face, as ruddy as a furnace, radiated that sort of geniality which as a ride made him tower in heartening comfort like Old King Cole. Gideon Fell, Miles knew, was an utterly kind-hearted, utterly honest, completely absent-minded and scatterbrained man whose best hits occurred half through absent-mindedness. His face at the moment, with the under-lip drawn up and the bandit's moustache drawn down, appeared something of a study in ferocity.

‘
You
agree, dear doctor?' persisted Rigaud.

‘Sir – ' began Dr Fell, rearing up with a powerful oratorical flourish like Dr Johnson. Then he seemed to change his mind; he subsided and scratched his nose.

‘Monsieur?' prompted Rigaud with the same formality.

‘I do not deny,' said Dr Fell, sweeping out one arm in a gesture which gravely endangered a bronze statuette on the bookshelves, ‘I do not deny that supernatural forces may exist in this world. In fact, I firmly believe they do exist.'

‘Vampires!' said Miles Hammond.

‘Yes,' agreed Dr Fell, with a seriousness which made Miles's heart sink. ‘Perhaps even vampires.'

Dr Fell's own crutch-handled stick was propped against the book-shelves. But he was now looking, with even more witless vacancy, at the thick yellow sword-cane still clutched under Professor Rigaud's arm.

Wheezing as he lumbered forward, Dr Fell took the cane from Rigaud. He turned it over in his fingers. Holding it in the same absent-minded fashion, he wandered over and sat down – very untidily – in a big tapestry chair by the empty fireplace. The whole room shook as he sat down, though this was a solidly constructed house.

‘But I believe,' he pursued, ‘like any honest psychical researcher, in first of all examining the facts.'

‘Monsieur,' cried Professor Rigaud, ‘I
give
you facts!'

‘Sir,' replied Dr Fell, ‘no doubt.'

Scowling, he blinked at the sword-cane. He slowly unscrewed the blade-handle, removed it from the scabbard, and studied it. He held the threads of the handle close to his lopsided eyeglasses, and tried to peer into the scabbard. When the learned doctor spoke again, rousing himself, it was in a voice like a schoolboy.

‘I say! Has anybody got a magnifying-glass?'

‘There's one here in the house,' answered Miles, who was trying to adjust his mind to this. ‘But I can't seem to remember where I saw it last. Would you like me to …?'

‘Candidly speaking,' said Dr Fell, with an air of guilty frankness, ‘I'm not sure it would be much good to me. But it makes an impressive picture, and gives the user a magnificent sense of self-importance. Harrumph.' His voice changed. ‘I think someone said there were bloodstains
inside
this scabbard?'

Professor Rigaud was almost at the point of jumping up and down on the floor.

‘There
are
bloodstains inside it! I said so last night to Miss Morell and Mr Hammond. I said so again to you this morning.' His voice grew challenging: ‘And then?'

‘Yes,' said Dr Fell, nodding in a slow and lion-like way, ‘that is still another point.'

Fumbling into his inside coat pocket under the big cape, Dr Fell drew out a folded sheaf of manuscript. Miles had no difficulty in recognizing it. It was Professor Rigaud's account of the Brooke case, written for the archives of the Murder Club and restored by Miles himself after it had been taken away by Barbara Morell. Dr Fell weighed it in his hand.

‘When Rigaud brought me this manuscript to-day,' he said in a tone of real reverence, ‘I read it with a pop-eyed fascination beyond words. O Lord! O Bacchus! This
is
one for the club! But it does rather prompt a strong question.' His eyes fixed on Miles. ‘Who is Barbara Morell, and why does she up-set the dinner of the Murder Club?'

‘Ah!' breathed Professor Rigaud, nodding very rapidly and rubbing his hands together, ‘that also interests me very much! Who
is
Barbara Morell?'

Miles stared back at them.

‘Hang it, don't look at me!
I
don't know!'

Professor Rigaud's eyebrows went up. ‘Yet one remembers that you accompanied her home?'

‘Only as far as the Underground station, that's all.'

‘You did not, perhaps, discuss this matter?'

‘No. That is – no.'

The stout little Frenchman had a very disconcerting eye.

‘Last night,' Professor Rigaud said to Dr Fell, after a long scrutiny of Miles, ‘this little Mees Morell is several times very much upset. Yes! The one obvious thing is that she is much concerned about Fay Seton, and undoubtedly knows her very well.'

‘On the contrary,' said Miles. ‘Miss Seton denies ever having met Barbara Morell, or knowing anything about her.'

It was as though you had struck a gong for silence. Professor Rigaud's expression was almost ghoulish.

‘She told you this?'

‘Yes.'

‘When?'

‘To-night, in the library, when I – asked her about things.'