He Who Whispers (2 page)

‘No. I'm a guest of Dr Gideon Fell.'

‘Of Dr Fell? So am I! I'm not a member, either. But that's just the trouble.' Miss Barbara Morell spread out her hands. ‘Not a single member has turned up to-night. The whole club has just … disappeared.'

‘
Disappeared
?'

‘Yes.'

Miles stared round the room.

‘There's nobody here,' the girl explained, ‘except you and me and Professor Rigaud. Frédéric the head-waiter is nearly frantic, and as for Professor Rigaud … well!' She broke off. ‘Why are you laughing?'

Miles had not meant to laugh. In any case, he told himself, you could hardly call it laughing.

‘I beg your pardon,' he hastened to say. ‘I was only thinking –'

‘Thinking what?'

‘Well! For years this club has been meeting, each time with a different speaker to give them the inside story of some celebrated horror. They've discussed crime; they've revelled in crime; they've even hung the picture of a skull on the wall as their symbol.'

‘Yes?'

He was watching the line of her hair, hair of such pale ash-blonde that it seemed almost white, parted in the middle after what seemed to him an old-fashioned manner. He met the upturned grey eyes, with their dark lashes and dead-black points of iris. Barbara Morell pressed her hands together. She had an eager way of giving you her whole attention, of seeming to hang on every word you uttered, very flattering to the scarred nerves of a man in convalescence.

He grinned at her.

‘I was only thinking,' he answered, ‘that it would be a triumph of sensationalism if on the night of this meeting each member of the club mysteriously disappeared from his home. Or if each were found, as the clock struck, sitting quietly at home with a knife in his back.'

The attempt at a joke fell flat. Barbara Morell changed colour slightly.

‘What a horrible idea!'

‘Is it? I'm sorry. I only meant …'

‘Do you by any chance write detective stories?'

‘No. But I read a lot of them. That is – oh, well!'

‘This is
serious
,' she assured him, with a small-girl naïveté and still a heightened colour in her face. ‘After all, Professor Rigaud has come a very long distance to tell them about this case, this murder on the tower; and then they treat him like this! Why?'

Suppose something
had
happened? It was incredible, it was fantastic, yet anything seemed possible when the whole evening was unreal. Miles pulled his wits together.

‘Can't we do something about finding out what's wrong?' he demanded. ‘Can't we telephone?'

‘They have telephoned!'

‘To whom?'

‘To Dr Fell; he's the Honorary Secretary. But there wasn't any reply. Now Professor Rigaud is trying to get in touch with the President, this judge, Mr Justice Coleman …'

It became clear, however, that he had not been able to get in touch with the President of the Murder Club. The door to the hall opened, with a sort of silent explosion, and Professor Rigaud came in.

Georges Antoine Rigaud, Professor of French Literature at the University of Edinburgh, had a savage catlike roll in his gait. He was short and stout; he was bustling; he was a little untidy, from bow tie and shiny dark suit to square-toed shoes. His hair showed very black above the ears, in contrast to a large bald head and a faintly purplish complexion. In general, Professor Rigaud varied between a portentous intensity of manner and a sudden expansive chuckle which showed the gleam of a gold tooth.

But no expansiveness was in evidence now. His thin shells of eyeglasses, even his patch of black moustache, seemed to tremble with rigid indignation. His voice was gruff and husky, his English almost without accent. He held up a hand, palm outwards.

‘Do not speak to me, please,' he said.

On the seat of a pink-brocaded chair against the wall lay a soft dark hat with a flopping brim, and a thick cane with a curved handle. Professor Rigaud bustled over and pounced on them.

His manner was now one of high tragedy.

‘For years,' he said, before straightening up, ‘they have asked me to come to this club. I say to them: No, no, no! – because I do not like journalists. “There will be no journalists,” they tell me, “to quote what you say.” “You promise that?” I ask. “Yes!” they say. Now I have come all the way from Edinburgh. And I could not get a sleeper on the train, either, because of “priority”.' He straightened up and shook a bulky arm in the air. ‘This word priority is a word which stinks in the nostrils of honest men!'

‘Hear, hear,
hear
,' said Miles Hammond with fervour.

Professor Rigaud woke up from his indignant dream, fixing Miles with a hard little glittering eye from behind the thin shells of glasses.

‘You agree, my friend?'

‘Yes!'

‘That is good of you. You are –?'

‘No,' Miles answered his unspoken question, ‘I'm not a missing member of the club. I'm a guest too. My name is Hammond.'

‘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.

T
HE
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.