He Who Whispers (20 page)

Barbara made a short, slight gesture.

‘If you remember, at Beltring's, I wasn't even so much as interested in anything except the murder. The things that went before it, the charges of immorality and – and the other ridiculous thing that almost got her stoned by the country people, didn't matter. Because they were a deliberate, cruel frame-up against her from start to finish.'

Barbara's voice rose.

‘I
knew
that. I can prove it. I've got a whole packet of letters to prove it. That woman's been in hell from lying gossip that prejudiced her in the eyes of the police, and may have ruined her life. I could have helped her. I
can
help her. But I'm too much of a coward! I'm too much of a coward! I'm too much of a coward!'

‘L
EICESTER
S
QUARE
!' sang the guard.

One or two persons got in. But the long, hot Underground car was still almost empty. The Australian soldier snored. A button tinkled, in communication with the driver far away at the front; the doors rolled shut. It was still a good distance to Camden Town.

Miles didn't notice. He was again in the upstairs room at Beltring's Restaurant, watching Barbara Morell as she faced Professor Rigaud across the dinner-table: watching the expression of her eyes, hearing that curious exclamation under her breath – incredulity or contempt – dismissing as of no importance the statement that Howard Brooke had cursed Fay Seton aloud in the Crédit Lyonnais Bank.

Miles was fitting every word, every gesture, into a pattern that hitherto had baffled him.

‘Professor Rigaud,' continued Barbara, ‘is very observant at seeing and describing the outside of things. But he never once realizes, he really doesn't, what's
inside
. I could have wept when he said jokingly that he was a blind bat and owl. Because in a sense that's perfectly true.

‘For a whole summer Professor Rigaud stood at Harry Brooke's shoulder. He preached at Harry; he moulded him, he influenced him. Yet he never guessed the truth. Harry, for all his athletic skill and his good looks – and,' said Barbara with contempt, ‘they must have been rather pretty-boy good looks – was simply a cold-hearted fish determined to get his own way.'

(Cold-hearted. Cold-hearted. Where had Miles heard that same term before?)

Barbara bit her lip.

‘You remember,' she said, ‘that Harry's heart was set on becoming a painter?'

‘Yes. I remember.'

‘And he would argue with his parents about it? And then, as Professor Rigaud described it, he would hit a tennis-ball like a streak or go out on the lawn and sit with a “white-faced brooding swearing look”?'

‘I remember that too.'

‘Harry knew it was the one thing on earth his parents would never consent to. They really did idolize him, but just because they idolized him they'd never consent. And he wasn't – wasn't man enough to leave a lot of money and strike out for himself. I'm sorry to talk like this,' Barbara added helplessly, ‘but it's true. So Harry, long before Fay Seton came there, set about scheming in his horrible little mind for a way to
compel
them to consent.

‘Then Fay arrived there to be his father's secretary, and he did see a way at last.

‘I – I've never met the woman,' Barbara confessed broodingly. ‘I can only judge her through letters. I may be all wrong. But I see her as passive and good-natured;
really
inexperienced; a bit of a romantic, and without much sense of humour.

‘And Harry Brooke thought of a way. First he would pretend to fall in love with Fay …'

‘Pretend to fall in love with her?'

‘Yes.'

Dimly Miles began to see the design take form. And yet it was inevitable. As inevitable as …

‘Tottenham Court Road!'

‘Stop a bit,' Miles muttered. ‘The old proverb says that there are two things which will be believed about any man, and one of them is that he has taken to drink. We might add that there are two things which will be believed about any woman, and both of them are …'

‘Both of them,' admitted Barbara, ‘are that she has a horribly bad character' – the colour went up in her face – ‘and probably carries on with every man in the district. The more quiet and unobtrusive she is, especially if she won't look you straight in the eye or enthuse over a lot of silly games like golf or tennis, then the more people are convinced there must be something in it.

‘Harry's scheme was as cold-blooded as that. He would write his father a lot of vilely phrased anonymous letters about her …'

‘Anonymous letters!' said Miles.

‘He would start a whispering campaign against her, connecting her name with Jean This and Jacques That. His parents – they weren't too keen already about his marrying anyone – would get alarmed at the scandal and beg him to break it off.

He'd already prepared the way by inventing a story, absolutely false, that she'd refused him the first time he proposed marriage with the hint that there was some terrible secret reason why she couldn't marry him. He told that tale to Professor Rigaud, and poor old Professor Rigaud retailed it to us. Do you recall that?'

Miles nodded.

‘I also recall,' he said, that when
I
mentioned the same story to her last night, she …'

‘She – what?'

‘Never mind! Go on!'

‘So the scandal would gather, and Harry's parents would beg him to break off the marriage. Harry would only look noble and refuse. The more he refused, the more frantic they would be. Finally he would be crushed, practically in tears, and he would say: “All right, I'll give her up. But if I do consent to give her up, will you send me to Paris for two years to study painting so that I can forget her?” '

‘Would they have agreed
then
? Don't we all know what families are? Of course they would have! They'd have seized at it in blessed relief.

‘Only,' added Barbara, ‘Harry's little plan didn't work out quite like that, you see.

‘The anonymous letters horribly worried his father, who wouldn't even so much as mention them to his mother. But Harry's whispering campaign in the district almost failed completely. You know that French shrug of the shoulder, and the
“Et alors
?” which just about corresponds to, “So what?” They were busy people; they had crops to harvest; such things harmed no one if they didn't interfere with work; so what?'

Barbara began to laugh hysterically, but she checked herself.

‘It was Professor Rigaud, always preaching to Harry about crime and the occult – he told us so himself – who in all innocence put Harry on to the thing these people really did fear. The thing that
would
make them talk and even scream. It's silly and it's horrible and of course it worked straight away. Harry deliberately bribed that sixteen-year-old boy to counterfeit marks in his own throat and start a story about a vampire …

‘You do see now, don't you?'

‘
Goodge Street
!'

‘Harry knew, of course, that his father wouldn't believe any nonsense about vampires. Harry didn't want his father to believe that. What Mr Brooke would hear, what he couldn't help hearing in every corner round Chartres, was a story about his son's fiancée visiting Pierre Fresnac so often at night, and … and all the rest of it. That would be enough. That would be more than enough.'

Miles Hammond shivered.

Clank-thud
went the train, roaring on in its fusty tunnel. Lights jolted on metal and upholstery. In Barbara's story Miles could see tragedy coming as clearly as though he did not already know of its existence.

‘I don't question what you tell me,' he said, and he took a key-ring out of his pocket and twisted it fiercely as though he wanted to tear it in two. ‘But how do you know these details?'

‘Harry wrote them all to my brother!' cried Barbara.

She was silent for a moment.

‘Jim's a painter, you see. Harry admired him tremendously. Harry thought – honestly thought! – that Jim as a man of the world would approve of his scheme to get away from a stuffy family atmosphere and call him no end of a clever fellow for thinking this up.'

‘Did you know all about it at the time?'

Barbara opened her eyes wide.

‘Good heavens, no! That was six years ago. I was only twenty at the time. I remember Jim did keep getting letters from France that worried him, but he never made any remark about it. Then …'

‘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.

J
IM
, 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.