He Who Whispers

“Yes?” said Fay.

Beside the chest-of-drawers there was an old armchair with patches of its back and arms frayed to threads. Fay sank down into it, her shoulders drooping. Though her expression hardly changed, the tears welled out of her eyes and ran unheeded down her cheeks. He had never sen her cry before, and this was worse than anything else.

“We know now,” said Miles, feeling numb, “that you weren't guilty of anything at all. I've heard . . . I've just heard, I tell you! . . . that all those accusations against you were a fake deliberately trumped up by Harry Brooke--”

Fay raised her head quickly.

“So you know that,” she said.

“What's more”--he suddenly realized something else, and stood back and pointed his fingers at her--”you knew it too! You knew they were trumped up by Harry Brooke! You've known it all along!”

It was more than the flash of illumination which sometimes comes from strung-up emotion: it was a fitting- together of facts.

“That's why, last night, you started to laugh in that crazy way when I asked you whether you and Harry Brooke had got married after all. That's why you brought up the subject of anonymous letters against you, though Rigaud had never mentioned any. That's why you talked about Jim Morell, the great friend Harry wrote to every week; though Rigaud never heard of him either.—You've known all along! Haven't you?”

“Yes. I've known all along.”

It was little more than a whisper. The tears still welled out of her eyes, and her lips had begun to shake as well.

“Are you insane, Fay? Have you gone completely off your head? Why didn't you ever speak out and say so?”

“Because . . . oh, God, what difference does it make now?”

“What difference does it make?” Miles swallowed hard, “With this damned thing--!” He strode over to the chest-of-drawers and picked up the packet of bank-notes, feeling repulsion in the touch of them. “There are three more packets in the brief-case, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Fay. “Three more. I only stole them. I didn't spend them.”

“Come to think of it, what else is in that brief-case? What makes it bulge like that?”

“Don't touch that brief-case! Please!”

“All right. I've got no right to badger you like this. I know that. I'm only doing it because—because it's necessary. But you ask what difference it makes? When for nearly six years the police have been trying to find out what happened to this case and the money inside it?”

The footsteps outside in the passage, which they had been too preoccupied to hear until now, approached the door with a casual air. But the tap on the door, though not loud, had a peremptory sound which could not be disregarded.

It was Miles who spoke; neither of the two women were capable of it.

“Who's there?”

“I'm a police officer,” said the voice outside, with that same combination of the casual and the peremptory. “Mind if I come in?”

Miles' hand, still holding the banknotes, moved as fast as a striking snake when he thrust those notes into his pocket. It was, he thought to himself, just as well. For the person outside did not wait for an invitation.

Framed in the doorway, as he swung the door wide open, stood a tall square-shouldered man in a raincoat and a bowler hat. All of them, perhaps, had been expecting a uniform to Miles at least this was rather more ominous. There was something vaguely familiar about the new-comer's face: the close-cropped moustache turning grey, the square jaw with muscles conspicuous at the corners, the suggestion of the military.

He stood looking from one to the other of the persons in front of him, his hand on the knob; and, in the passage behind him, the light reared and lowered a shadow of he opening and closing of teeth.

Twice those teeth opened and closed before the newcomer cleared his throat.

“Miss Fay Seton?”

Fay rose to her feet, turning out her wrist by way of reply. Superbly graceful, unconscious of the tear-stains on her face; drained of violence, past caring.

“My name is Hadley,” the stranger announced. “Superintendent Hadley. Metropolitan C.I.D.”

And now Miles realized why this face was vaguely familiar. Miles had moved over to the side of Barbara Morell. It was Barbara who spoke.

“I interviewed you once,” said Barbara shakily, “for the Morning Record. You talked a good deal, but you wouldn't give m permission to print much of it.”

“Right,” agreed Hadley, and looked at her. “You're Miss Morell, of course.” He looked thoughtfully at Miles. “And you must be Mr. Hammond. You seem to have got yourself pretty thoroughly soaking wet.”

“It wasn't raining when I left home.”

“Always wise,” said Hadley, shaking his head, “to take a raincoat when you go out in these days. I could lend you mine, only I'm afraid I'm going to need it myself.”

The studiedly social air of all this, with its element of deadly danger and tension underneath, couldn't go on for long. Miles broke it.

“Look here, Superintendent!” He burst out. “You didn't come here to talk about the weather. The main thing is—you're a friend of Dr. Fell.”

“That's right,” agreed Hadley. He came in, removed his hat, and closed the door.

“But Dr. Fell said the police weren't going to be brought into this!”

“Into what?” Hadley asked politely, with a slight smile.

“Into anything!”

“Well, that depends on what you mean,” said Hadley.

His eyes wandered round the room: at Fay's handbag and black beret on the bed, at the big dusty tin box drawn out from under the bed, at the drawn curtains on the two little windows. His gaze rested, without apparent curiosity, on the brief-case lying there conspicuously under the light over the chest-of-drawers.

Miles, his right hand tightly clutching the sheaf of banknotes in his pocket, watched him as you might watch a tame tiger.

“The fact is,” Hadley pursued easily, “I've had a very long 'phone conversation with the maestro . . .”

“With Dr. Fell?

“Yes. And a good deal of it wasn't quite clear. But it seems, Mr. Hammond, your sister had a very bad and dangerous scare last night.”

Fay Seton moved round the big tin box and picked up her handbag from the bed. She went to the chest-of- drawers, tilted the mirror above it so as better to catch the light, and set about with handkerchief and powder to remove the traces of tears. Her eyes in the mirror were blank, like blue marbles; but her elbow quivered frantically.

Miles clutched the banknotes.

“Dr. Fell told you what happened at Greywood?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“So the police have to be called in?”

“Oh, no. Not unless we're asked. And in any case you'd approach toe police of the district; not London. No,” said Hadley in a leisurely way, “what Fell really wanted was to know the name of a certain test.

“Certain test?”

“A scientific test to determine . . . well, what he wanted to determine. And whether I could tell him anyone who knew how to carry it out. He said he couldn't remember the name of the test, or anything much about it except that you used melted paraffin.” Hadley smiled slightly. “He meant the Gonzalez test, of course.”

Then Superintendent Hadley moved forward.

“Dr. Fell also asked me,” he went on, “whether we had any means of finding out Miss Seton's address, in