He Who Whispers (4 page)

‘And then ... tragedy.

‘Black tragedy, I tell you, as unforeseen and as unnerving as a bolt of magic.'

Professor Rigaud paused.

He had been sitting forward with his thick elbows on the table, arms upraised, the forefinger of his right hand tapping impressively against the forefinger of his left hand each time he made a point, his head a little on one side. He was like a lecturer. His shining eyes, his bald head, even his rather comical patch of moustache, had a fervour of intensity.

‘Hah!' he said.

Exhaling his breath noisily through the nostrils, he sat upright. The thick cane, propped against his leg, fell to the floor with a clatter. He picked it up and set it carefully against the table. Reaching into his inside pocket, he produced a folded sheaf of manuscript and a photograph about half cabinet size.

‘This,' he announced, ‘is a photograph of Miss Fay Seton. It was done in colour, not crudely either, by my friend Coco Legrand. The manuscript is an account of this case, which I have specially written for the archives of the Murder Club. But look, please, at the photograph!'

He pushed it across the tablecloth, brushing away crumbs as he did so.

A soft face, a disturbingly haunting face, looked out past the shoulder of the beholder. The eyes were wide-spaced, the brows thin; the nose was short; the lips were full and rather sensual, though this was contradicted by the grace and fastidiousness about the carriage of the head. Those lips just avoided the twitch of a smile at their outer corners. The weight of dark red hair, smooth as fleece, seemed almost too heavy for the slender neck.

It was not beautiful. Yet it troubled the mind. Something about the eyes – was it irony, was it bitterness under the far-away expression? – at once challenged you and fled from you.

‘Now tell me!' said Professor Rigaud, with the proud satisfaction of one who believes himself to be on sure ground. ‘Can you see anything wrong in that face?'

‘W
RONG
?' echoed Barbara Morell.

Georges Antoine Rigaud seemed convulsed by some vast inner amusement.

‘Exactly, exactly, exactly! Why do I designate her as so very dangerous a woman?'

Miss Morell had been following this narrative with the utmost absorption, and a faintly contemptuous expression. Once or twice she had glanced at Miles, as though about to speak. She watched Professor Rigaud as he picked up his dead cigar from the edge of a saucer, took a triumphant puff at it, and put it down again.

‘I'm afraid,' – suddenly her voice went high, as though she were somehow personally concerned in this – ‘I'm afraid we must get back to a matter of definition. How do you mean, dangerous? So attractive that she … well, turned the head of every man she met?'

‘No!' said Professor Rigaud with emphasis.

Again he chuckled.

‘I admit, mark you,' he hastened to add, ‘that with many men this might well be the case. Look at the photograph there! But it was not what I meant.'

‘Then in what way dangerous?' persisted Barbara Morell, a lustre of intentness, even slight anger, coming into her grey eyes. She shot out the next question as something like a challenge. ‘You mean – a criminal?'

‘My dear young lady! No, no, no!'

‘An adventuress, then?'

Barbara struck her hand against the edge of the table.

‘A trouble-maker of some kind, is that it?' she cried. ‘Malicious? Or spiteful? Or tale-bearing?'

‘I say to you,' declared Professor Rigaud, ‘that Fay Seton was none of those things. Forgive me if I, the old cynic, insist that in her puritanical way she was altogether gentle and good-hearted.'

‘Then what's left?'

‘What is left, mademoiselle, is the real answer to the mystery. The mystery of the unpleasant rumours that began to creep through Chartres and the surrounding country. The mystery of why our sober, conservative Mr Howard Brooke, her prospective father-in-law, cursed her aloud in a public place like the Crédit Lyonnais Bank …'

Under her breath Barbara uttered a curious sound which was either incredulity or contempt, either disbelieving this or dismissing it as of no importance whatever. Professor Rigaud blinked at her.

‘You doubt me, mademoiselle?'

‘No! Of course not!' Her colour went up. ‘What do
I
know about it?'

‘And you, Mr Hammond:
you
say little?'

‘Yes,' Miles replied absently. ‘I was –'

‘Looking at the photograph?'

‘Yes. Looking at the photograph.'

Professor Rigaud opened his eyes delightedly.

‘You are impressed, eh?'

‘There's a kind of spell about it,' said Miles, brushing his hand across his forehead. ‘The eyes there in the picture! And the way she's got her head turned. Confound the photograph!'

He, Miles Hammond, was a tired man only recently recovered from a very long illness. He wanted peace. He wanted to live in seclusion in the New Forest, among old books, with his sister to keep house for him until her marriage. He didn't want to have his imagination stirred. Yet he sat staring at the photograph, staring at it under the candle-light until its subtle colours grew blurred, while Professor Rigaud went on.

‘These rumours about Fay Seton …'

‘What rumours?' Barbara asked sharply.

Blandly, Professor Rigaud ignored this.

‘For myself, blind bat and owl that I am, I had heard nothing of them. Harry Brooke and Fay Seton became engaged to be married in the middle of July. Now I must tell you about the twelfth of August.

‘On that day, which seemed to me like any other day, I am writing a critical article for the
Revue des Deux Mondes
. All morning I write in my pleasant hotel room, as I have been doing for nearly a week. But after lunch I step across the Place des Epars to get my hair cut. And while I am there, I think to myself, I will just go into the Crédit Lyonnais and cash a cheque before the bank closes.

‘It was very warm. All morning the sky had been heavy and dark, with fits of vague prowling thunder and sometimes spatters of rain. But nothing more than a drizzle; no cloud-burst; nothing to let the heat out and give us peace. So I went into the Crédit Lyonnais. And the first person I saw, coming out of the manager's office, was Mr Howard Brooke.

‘Odd?

‘Rather odd, yes! For I had imagined he would be at his office, like the conscientious fellow he was.

‘Mr Brooke regarded me very strangely. He wore a raincoat and a tweed cap. Over his left arm was hung the crook of a cane, and in his right hand he carried an old black-leather brief-case. It seemed to me even then that his light-blue eyes looked strangely watery; nor had I ever noticed before, in a man so fit, that there was sagging flesh under his chin.

‘ “My dear Brooke!” I said to him, and shook hands with him in spite of himself. His hand felt very limp. “My dear Brooke,” I said, “this is an unexpected pleasure! How is everyone at home? How is your good wife, and Harry, and Fay Seton?”

‘ “Fay Seton?” he said to me. “Damn Fay Seton.”

‘Ouf!

‘He had spoken in English, but so loudly that one or two persons in the bank glanced round. He flushed with embarrassment, this good man, but he was so troubled that he did not really seem to care. He marched me to the front of the bank, beyond hearing of anyone else. Then he opened the brief-case, and showed me.

‘Inside, in solitary state, were four slender packets of English banknotes. Each packet contained twenty-five twenty-pound notes: two thousand pounds.

‘ “I had to send to Paris for these,” he told me, and his hands were trembling. “I thought, you know, that English notes would be more tempting. If Harry won't give the woman up, I must simply buy her off. Now you must excuse me.”

‘And he straightened his shoulders, shut up the brief-case, and walked out of the bank without another word.

‘My friends, have you ever been hit very hard in the stomach? So that your eyesight swims, and your stomach rises up, and you feel suddenly like a rubber toy squeezed together? That was how I felt then. I forgot to write a cheque. I forgot everything. I walked back to my hotel, through a drizzling rain that was turning black and greasy the cobble-stones of the Place des Epars.

‘But it was impossible to write, as I discovered. About half an hour later, at a quarter past three, the telephone rang. I think I guessed what it might be about, though I did not guess what it was. It was Mama Brooke, Mrs Georgina Brooke, and she said:

‘ “
For God's sake, Professor Rigaud, come out here immediately
.”

‘This time, my friends, I am more than disturbed.

‘This time I am thoroughly well frightened, and I confess it!

‘I got out my Ford; I drove out to their house as fast as I could, and with an even more execrable style of driving than usual. Still it would not rain properly, would not burst a hole in this hollow of thundery heat that enclosed us. When I reached Beauregard, it was like a deserted house. I called aloud in the downstairs hall, but nobody answered. Then I went into the drawing-room, where I found Mama Brooke sitting bolt upright on a sofa, making heroic efforts to keep her face from working, but with a damp handkerchief clutched in her hand.

‘ “Madame,” I said to her, “what is happening? What is wrong between your good husband and Miss Seton?”

‘And she cried out to me, having nobody else to whom she could appeal.

‘ “I don't know!” she said; it was plain she meant it. “Howard won't tell me. Harry says it's all nonsense, whatever it is, but he won't tell me anything either. Nothing is real any longer. Only two days ago …”

‘Only two days before, it appeared, there had been a shocking and unexplained incident.

‘Near Beauregard, on the main road to Le Mans, lived a market-gardener named Jules Fresnac, who supplied them with eggs and fresh vegetables. Jules Fresnac had two children – a daughter of seventeen, a son of sixteen – to whom Fay Seton had been very kind, so that the whole Fresnac family was very fond of her. But two days ago Fay Seton had met Jules Fresnac driving his cart in the road, in the white road with the tall poplars and grain-fields on either side. Jules Fresnac got down from his cart, his fate bluish and swollen with fury, and shouted and screamed at her until she put up a hand to cover her eyes.

‘All this was witnessed by Mama Brooke's maid, Alice. Alice was too far away to catch what was being said; the man's voice, in any case, was so hoarse with rage as to be almost unrecognizable. But, as Fay Seton turned round to hurry away, Jules Fresnac picked up a stone and flung it at her.

‘A pretty story, eh?

‘This was what Mama Brooke told me, with helpless gestures of her hands, while she sat on the sofa in that drawing-room.

‘ “And now,” she said, “Howard has gone out to that tower, to Henry the Fourth's tower, to meet poor Fay. Professor Rigaud, you have got to help us. You have got to do something.”

‘ “But, madame! What can I do?”

‘ “I can't tell you,” she answered me; she might once have been pretty. “But something dreadful is going to happen! I know it!”

‘Mr Brooke, it developed, had returned from the bank at three o'clock with his brief-case full of money. He told his wife that he meant to have what he called a show-down with Fay Seton, and that he had arranged to meet her at the tower at four o'clock.

‘He then asked Mama Brooke where Harry was, because he said he wanted Harry to be present at the show-down. She replied that Harry was upstairs in his room, writing a letter, so the father went upstairs to get him. He didn't find Harry – who, actually, was tinkering with a motor in the garage – and presently he came downstairs again. “So
pitiful
he looked,” said Mama Brooke, “and so aged, and walking slowly as though he were ill.” That was how Papa Brooke went out of the house towards the tower.

‘Not five minutes later, Harry himself turned up from the garage and asked where his father was. Mama Brooke told him, rather hysterically. Harry stood for a moment thinking to himself, muttering, and then
he
went out of the house towards Henri Quatre's tower. During this time there was no sign of Fay Seton.

‘ “Professor Rigaud,” the mother cried to me, “you've got to follow them and do something. You're the only friend we have here, and you've got to follow them!”

‘A job, eh, for old Uncle Rigaud?

‘My word!

‘And yet I followed them.

‘There was a crack of thunder as I left the house, but still it would not rain in earnest. I walked northwards along the east bank of the river, until I came to the stone bridge. There I crossed the bridge to the west bank. The tower stood on that side, overhanging the bank a little farther up.

‘It looks desolate enough, I tell you, when you stumble across the few old bits of blackened stone – fire-razed, over-grown in the earth with weeds – which are all that remain of the original building. The entrance to the tower is only a rounded arch cut in the wall. This doorway faces west, away from the river, towards open grass and a wood of chestnut trees beyond. I approached there with the sky darkening, and the wind blowing still harder.

‘In the doorway, looking at me, stood Fay Seton.

‘Fay Seton, in a thin flowered-silk frock, stockingless, with white openwork leather sandals. She carried over her arm a bathing-dress, a towel, and a bathing-cap; but she had not been in to swim, since not even the edges of the shining dark-red hair were damp or tumbled. She breathed slowly and heavily.

‘ “Mademoiselle,” I said to her, not at all certain what I was supposed to do, “I am looking for Harry Brooke and his father.”

‘For some five seconds, which can seem a very long time, she did not answer.

‘ “They're here,” she told me. “Upstairs. On the roof of the tower.” All of a sudden her eyes (I swear it!) were the eyes of one who remembers a horrible experience of some kind. “They seem to be having an argument. I don't think I shall intrude just now. Excuse me.”