He Who Whispers

“Find her and stay with her! Find her and stay with her!” That had been the burden of it. “If she insists on coming back to Greywood tonight, that's all right—in fact, it's probably the best thing—but stay with her and don't leave her side for a minute!”

“Is she in danger?”

“In my opinion, yes,” said Dr. Fell. “And if you want to see her proved innocent of”--he hesitated—“of at least the worst charge against her, for the love of heaven don't fail me!”

The worst charge against her?

Miles shook his head. The jerk of the train swayed and roused him. Fay had either missed the train—which seemed incredible, unless the bus had broken down—or, more probably, she had turned back after all.

And here he was speeding away in the opposite direction, away from whatever might be happening. But . . . hold on! Here was a hopeful point! . . . the “something damnable” Dr. Fell had predicted seemed to concern what would occur if Fay went to London and returned to carry out her plans. That meant there was nothing to worry about. Or did it?

Miles could never remember a longer journey. The train was an express; he couldn't have got out to turn back if he had wanted to. Rain-ships stung the windows. Miles got entangled with a family party which overflowed from compartment into corridor like a camp-fire group, and remembered that its sandwiches were in a suitcase under a mountainous pile of somebody else's luggage, and for a time created the general wild aspect of moving- day. It was twenty minutes to four when the train drew in at Waterloo.

Waiting for him, just outside the barrier, stood Barbara Morell.

The sheer pleasure he felt at seeing her momentarily drove out his anxieties. Round them the clacking torrent from the train poured through the barrier. From the station loud-speaker a refined voice hollowly enunciated.

“Hello,” said Barbara.

She seemed more aloof than he remembered her.

“Hello,” said Miles. “I—er--hardly liked to drag you over here to the station.”

“Oh, that's all right,” said Barbara. He well remembered, now, the grey eyes with their long black lashes. “Besides, I have to be at the office later this evening.”

“At the office? On Sunday night?” “I'm in Fleet Street,” said Barbara. “I'm a journalist. That's why I said I didn't 'exactly' write fiction.” She brushed this away. The grey eyes studied him furtively. “What's wrong?” she asked suddenly. “What is it? You look . . .”

“There's the devil and all to pay,” Miles burst out. He felt somehow that he could let himself go in front of this girl. “I was supposed to find Fay Seton at any cost. Everything depended on it. We all thought she'd be in this train. Now I don't know what in blazes to do, because she wasn't in the train after all.”

“Wasn't in the train?” Barbara repeated. Her eyes opened wide. “But Fay Seton was in the train! She walked through that barrier not twenty seconds before you did!”

“Will pass-en-gers for Hon-i-ton,” sang the dictatorial loudspeaker, “join the queue outside Platform Num-ber Nine! Will pass-en-gers for Hon-i-ton . . .”

It blattered above every other noise in the station. And yet the realm of nightmare had returned.

“You must have been seeing things!” said Miles. “I tell you she wasn't aboard that train!” He looked round wildly as a new thought occurred to him. “Stop a bit! So you do know her after all?”

“No! I'd never set eyes on her before in my life!”

“Then how do you know it was Fay Seton?”

“From the photograph. The coloured photograph Professor Rigaud showed us on Friday night. After all, I . . . I though she was with you. And so I wasn't going to keep the appointment. Or at least—I didn't quite know. What's wrong?”

This was disaster fine and full.

He wasn't mad, Miles told himself; and he wasn't drunk, and he wasn't blind; and he could take his oath Fay Seton had not been aboard that train. Fantastic images occurred to him, of a white face and a red mouth. These images were exotic plants which withered in the atmosphere of Waterloo Station, certainly in the atmosphere of the train he had just left.

Yet he looked down at Barbara's fair hair and grey eyes; he thought of her normalness-that was it! A lovable normalness—in this murky affair; and at the same time he thought of all that had happened since he saw her last.

Marion was lying in a stupor at Greywood, and not from the effects of poison or a knife. Dr. Fell had spoken of an evil spirit. These things were not fancies; they were facts. Miles remembered his impression of that morning: here's a malignant force, and Dr. Fell knows what it is; we'll kill it, or it will kill us; and, in sober God's truth, the game had begun now.

All this went through his head in the split-second of Barbara's remark.

“You saw Fay Seton come through the gates,” he said. “In which direction did she go?”

“I couldn't tell. There are too many people.”

“Wait a minute! We're not beaten yet! Professor Rigaud told me last night . . . yes, he's at Greywood too! . . . that you 'phoned him yesterday, and that you knew Fay's address. She's got a room in town somewhere, and according to Dr. Fell she'll go straight to it. Do you know the address?”

“Yes!” Barbara, in a tailored suit and white blouse, with a mackintosh draped over her shoulders and an umbrella hung across her arm, fumblingly opened her handbag and took out an address-book. “This is t. Fiver Bolsover Place, N.W.1. But . . .!”

“Where's Bolsover Place??”

“Well, Bolsover Street is off Camden High Street in Camden Town. I—I looked it up when I wondered whether I ought to go and see her. It's rather a dingy neighborhood, but imagine she's even more hard up than the rest of us.”

“What's her quickest way to get there?”

“By Underground, easily. You can go straight through from here without a change.”

“Then that's what she's done, you can bet a fiver! She can't be two minutes ahead of us! Probably we can catch her! Come on!”

Give me some luck! He was praying under his breath. Give me just one proper hand to play, one card higher than a deuce or a three! And not long afterwards, when they burst out of a ticket-queue and penetrated down into the airless depths where a maze of lines join, he got his card.

Miles heard the rumble of the approaching train as they emerged on the platform of the Northern Line. They were at one end of the platform, and people straggled for more than a hundred yards along its curve. Vision was blurred in this half-cylinder cavern, once brave with white tiling, now sordid and ill-lighted.

The red train swept out of its tunnel in a gale of wind, and streamed past to a stop. And he saw Fay Seton.

He saw her by the bright flash of windows now unscaled from blast-netting. She was standing at the extreme other end of the platform, the front of the train; and she moved forward as the doors rolled open.

“Fay!” he yelled. “Fay!”

It went completely unheard.

“Edgware train!” the guard was bellowing. “Edgware train!”

“Don't try to run up there!” warned Barbara. “The doors will close and we'll lose her together. Hadn't we better go in here?”

They dived into the rear car of the train, a non-smoker, just before the doors did close. Its only other occupants were a policeman, a somnolent-looking Australian soldier, and the guard at his panel of control-buttons. Miles had got only a faint glimpse of Fay's face; but it had looked fierce, preoccupied, with that same curious smile of last night.

It was maddening to be so close to her, and yet . . .

“If I can get through to the front of the train--!”

“Please!” urged Barbara. She indicated the sign, “Do Not Pass From One Car To Another Whilst The Train Is In Motion”' she indicated the guard, and she indicated the policeman. “It wouldn't do much good, would it,if you