He Who Whispers

gritty dust. Hadley took the whole lot away with him, including my concealed notes, when he left with Fay in the – in the ambulance.

Miles gritted his teeth.

“I mention all this,” he went on, “because so many hints have been made about her guilt that I'd like to see justice done in one respect. Whatever reason you had for asking me, Dr. Fell, you did ask me to get in touch with Barbara Morell. And I did, with sensational results.”

“Ah!” murmured Dr. Fell in a vaguely distressed way. He would not meet Miles' eyes.

“Did you know, for instance, that it was Harry Brooke who wrote a series of anonymous letters accusing Fay of having affairs with men all over the district? And then, when that charge fell flat, Harry stirred up superstition by bribing young Fresnac to slash marks in his own neck and start this nonsense about vampirism? Did you know that?”

“Yes,” assented Dr. Fell. “I know it. It's true enough.”

“We have here”--Miles gestured to Barbara, who opened her handbag--”a letter written by Harry Brooke on the very afternoon of the murder. He wrote it to Barbara's brother, who,” Miles added hastily, “isn't at all concerned in this. If you still have any doubts . . .”

Dr. Fell reared up his shoulders with sudden acute interest.

“You have that letter?” he demanded. “May I see it?”

“With pleasure. Barbara?”

Rather reluctantly, Miles thought, Barbara handed over the letter. Dr. Fell took it, adjusted his eyeglasses, and slowly read it through. His expression had grown even more lowering when he put it down on one knee on top of the manuscript and the photograph.

“It's a pretty story, isn't it?” Miles asked bitterly. “A very fine thing to hound her with! But let's leave Harry's ethics out of this, if nobody gives a curse about Fay's side of it. The point is, this whole situation came about through a trick played by Harry Brooke . . .”

“No!” said Dr. Fell in a voice like a pistol-shot.

Miles stared at him.

“What do you mean by that?” Miles demanded. “You're not saying that Pierre Fresnac and this grotesque charge of vampirism--?”

“Oh, no,” said Dr. Fell, shaking his head. “We may leave young Fresnac and the manufactured teeth-marks entirely out of the picture. They are irrelevant. They don't count. But . . .”

“But what?”

Dr. Fell, after contemplating the floor, slowly raised his head and looked Miles in the eyes.

“Harry Brooke,” he said, “wrote a lot of anonymous letters containing accusations in which he didn't believe. That is the irony! That is the tragedy! For, although Harry Brooke didn't know it—didn't dream of it, wouldn't have believed it if you'd told him—the accusations were nevertheless perfectly true.”

Silence.

A silence which stretched out unendurably . . .

Barbara Morell put her hand softly on Miles' arm. It seemed to Miles that between Dr. Fell and Barbara flashed a glance of understanding. But he wanted time to assimilate the meaning of those words.

“Behold now,” said Dr. Fell, rounding the syllables with thunderous emphasis, “an explanation which presently will fit so many puzzling factors in this affair. Fay Seton had to have men. I wish to put this matter with delicacy, so I will merely refer you to the psychologist. But is is a form of psychic illness which has tortured her since youth.

“She is no more to be blamed for it than for the heart-weakness which accompanied it. In women so constituted—there are not a great number of them, but they do appear in consulting-rooms—the result does not always end in actual disaster. But Fay Seton (don't you see?) was emotionally the wrong kind of woman to have this quirk in her nature. Her outward Puritanism, her fastidiousness, hr delicacy, her gentle manners, were not assumed. They are real. To have relations with casual strangers was and is torture to her.

“When she went out to France as Howard Brooke's secretary in nineteen-thirty-nine, she was resolved to conquer this. She would: she would, she would! Her behaviour as Chartres was irreproachable. And then . . .”

Dr. Fell paused.

Again he took up the photograph and studied it.

“Do you begin to understand now? The atmosphere which always surrounded her was an air of . . . well, look into your own memory! It went with her. It haunted her. It clung round her. That was the quality which touched and troubled everywhere the people with whom sh came in contact, even though they did not understand it. It was a quality sensed by nearly all men. It was a quality sensed, and bitterly resented, by nearly all women.

“Think of Georgina Brooke! Think of Marion Hammond! Think of . . .” Dr. Fell broke off, and blinked at Barbara. “I believe you met her a while ago, ma'am?”

Barbara made a helpless gesture.

“I only met Fay for a very few minutes!” she protested quickly. “How on earth could I tell anything? Of course not! I . . .”

“Will you think again, ma'am?” said Dr. Fell gently.

“Besides,” said Barbara, “I liked her!”

And Barbara turned away.

Dr. Fell tapped the photograph. The pictured eyes-with their faint irony, their bitterness under the far-away expression—made Fay Seton's presence live and move in this room as strongly as the discarded handbag still on the chest-of-drawers, or the fallen identity card, or the black beret on the bed.

“That is the figure, good-natured an well-meaning, we must see walking in bewilderment—or apparent bewilderment—through the events that follow.” Dr. Fell's big voice was raised. “Two crimes were committed. Both of them were the work of the same criminal . . .”

“The same criminal?” cried Barbara.

And Dr. Fell nodded.

“The first,” he said, “was unpremeditated and slap-dash; it became a miracle in spite of itself. The second was planned and careful, bringing a bit of the dark world into our lives! Shall I continue? ”

Chapter XIX

Absently Dr. Fell was filling his meerschaum pipe as he spoke, the manuscript and the photograph and the letter still on his knee, and his eye fixed drowsily on a corner of the ceiling.

“I should like, with your permission, to take you back to Chartres on the fateful twelfth of August when Howard Brooke was murdered.

“Now I am no orator, as Rigaud is. He could describe for you, in stabbing little phrases clustered together, the house called Beauregard, and the winding river, and Henri Quatre's tower looming over the trees, and the hot thundery day when it wouldn't quite rain. In fact, he had done so.” Dr. Fell tapped the manuscript. “But I want you to understand that little group of people at Beauregard.

“Archons of Athens! It couldn't have been worse.

“Fay Seton had become engaged to Harry Brooke. She had really fallen in love—or had convinced herself she had—with a callow, coldhearted young man who had nothing to recommend him except his youth and his good looks. Do you remember that scene, described by Harry to Rigaud, in which Harry proposes marriage and is at first rejected?

Again Barbara protested.

“But that incident,” she cried, “wasn't true! It never happened!”

“Oh, ah,” agreed Dr. Fell, nodding with some violence. “It never happened. The point being that it might well have happened in every detail. Fay Seton must have known, in her heart of hearts, that with all her good intentions she couldn't marry anybody unless she wanted to wreck the marriage in three months by her . . . well, let it pass.

“But this time—no! This time is different. We have changed all that. This time she is really in love,