He Who Whispers

from ME. And I have received it from an incident in the life of Count Cagliostro.”

“Of course!” breathed Barbara.

“Mademoiselle,” said Professor Rigaud in a fever, beginning to hammer the flat of his hand on the table, “will you oblige me by not saying 'of course' on the wrong occasion? Explain if you please”--the rapping grew to a frenzy—“how you mean 'of course' or how you could possibly mean 'of course'!”

“I'm sorry.” Barbara looked around helplessly. “I only meant you told us yourself you kept lecturing to Harry Brooke about crime and the occult . . .”

“But what's occult about this?” asked Miles. “Before you arrived this afternoon, Dr. Fell, our friend Rigaud talked a lot of gibberish about that business. He said that what frightened Marion was something she had heard and felt, but not seen. But that's impossible on the face of it.”

“Why impossible?” asked Dr. Fell.

“Well! Because she must have seen something! After all, she did fire a shot at it . . .”

“Oh, no, she didn't!” said Dr. Fell sharply.

Miles and Barbara stared at each other.

“But a shot,” insisted Miles, 'was fired in that room when we heard it?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then at whom was it fired? At Marion?”

“Oh, no,” answered Dr. Fell.

Barbara put a soothing hand gently on Miles' arm.

“Maybe it would be better,” she suggested, “if we let Dr. Fell tell it his own way.”

“Yes,” Dr. Fell sounded fussed. He looked at Miles. “I think—harrumph--I am perhaps puzzling you a little,” he said in a tone of genuine distress.

“Odd as I may sound, you are.”

“Yes. But there was no intention to puzzle. You see, I should have realized all along your sister could never have fired that shot. She was relaxed. Her whole body, as in all cases of shock, was completely limp and nerveless. And yet, when we first saw her, her fingers were clutched around the handle of the revolver.

“Now that's impossible. If she had fired a shot before collapsing, the mere weight of the revolver would have dragged it out of her hand. Sir, it meant that her fingers were carefully placed around the revolver afterwards, in a very fine bit of misdirection, to throw us all off the track.

“But I never saw this until this afternoon when, in my scatterbrained way, I was musing over the life of Cagliostro. I found myself touching lightly on various incidents in his career. I remembered his initiation into the lodge of a secret society at the King's Head Tavern in Gerrard Street.

“Frankly, I am very fond of secret societies myself. But I must point out that initiations in the eighteenth century were not exactly tea-parties at Cheltenham today. They were always unnerving. They were sometimes dangerous. When the Grand Goblin issued an order of life-or-death, the neophyte could never be sure he didn't mean business.

“So let us see!

“Cagliostro—blindfolded and on his knees—had already had something of an unnerving time. Finally, they told him he must prove his fidelity to the order, even if it meant his death. They put a pistol into his hand, and said it was loaded. They told him to put the pistol to his own head, and pull the trigger.

“Now the candidate believed, as anyone would, that this was only a hoax. He believed the hammer would fall on an empty gun. But in that one second, stretching out to eternity, when he pulled the trigger . . .

“Cagliostro pulled the trigger. And instead of a click there was a thunderous report, the flash of the pistol, the stunning shock of the bullet.

“What happened, of course, was that the pistol in his hand was empty after all. But, at the very instant he pulled the trigger, someone else holding another pistol beside his ear—pointing away from him—had fired a real shot and rapped him sharply over the head. He never forgot that single instant when he felt, or thought he felt, the crash of the bullet into his own head.

“How would that do as an idea for murder? The murder of a woman with a weak heart?

“You creep up in the middle of the night. You gag your victim, before she can cry out, with some soft material that will leave no traces afterwards. You hold to her temple the cold muzzle of a pistol, an empty pistol. And for minutes, dragging terrible minutes in the small hours of the night, you whisper to her.

“You are going to kill her, you explain. Your whispering voice goes on, telling her all about t. She does not se a second pistol loaded with real bullets.

“At the proper time (so runs your own plan) you will fire a bullet close to her head, but not so close that the expansion of gases will leave powder-marks on her. You will then put the revolver into her own hand. After her death it will be believed that she fired at some imaginary burglar or intruder or ghost, and that no other person was there at all.

“So you keep on whispering, multiplying terrors in the dark. The time, you explain, is at hand now. Very slowly you squeeze the trigger of the empty gun, to draw back the hammer. She hears the oily noise of the hammer moving back . . . slowly, very slowly . . . the hammer creaking farther . . . the hammer at its peak before it strikes, and then . . .”

Whack!

Dr. Fell brought his hand down sharply on the table. It was only that, the noise of a hand striking wood; and yet all three of his listeners jumped as though they had seen the flash and heard the shot.

Barbara, her face white, got up and backed away from the table. The candle-flames, too, were still shaking and jumping.

“Look here!” said Miles. “Damn it all!”

“I harrumph—beg you pardon,” said Dr. Fell, making guilty gestures and fixing his eyeglasses more firmly on his nose. “It was not really meant to upset anyone. But it was necessary to make you understand the diablerie of the trick.

“On a woman with a weak heart it was not at all problematical; it was certain. Forgive me, my dear Hammond; but you saw what happened in the case of a sound woman like your sister.

“None of us (let us face it) has too-steady nerves nowadays, especially where bumps of bangs are concerned. You said your sister didn't like the blitzes or the V-weapons. That was the only sort of thing that might have frightened her, as it did.

“And, by thunder, sir!--if you are worrying about you sister, if you are feeling sorry for things, if you are wondering how she will take it when she hears of all this, just ask yourself what she would have been let in for if she had married 'Stephen Curtis'.”

“Yes,” sad Miles. He put his elbows on the table and his temples in his hands. “Yes. I see. Go on.”

“Harrumph, ha!” said Dr. Fell.

“Once having tumbled to the trick early this afternoon,” he continued, “the whole design unrolled itself at once. Why should anyone have attacked Marion Hammond like that?

“I remembered the interesting reaction of 'Mr. Curtis' to the announcement that it was Marion who had been frightened. I remembered your own remarks about bedrooms. I remembered a woman's figure in a nightgown and wrap, walking back and forth in front of the uncurtained windows. I remembered a perfume-bottle. And the answer was that nobody had tried to frighten Marion Hammond. The intended victim was Fay Seton.

“But in that case . . .

“First of all, you may remember, I went up to your sister's bedroom. I wanted to see if the assailant might have left any traces.

“There would have been no violence, of course. The murderer wouldn't even have needed to tie his victim. After the first few minutes he wouldn't have needed to hold her at all; he could use his two hands for his revolvers—one empty, one loaded—because the pistol-muzzle at the temple would have been enough.

“But is was just possible that the gag (which he had to have) might have left some traces on her teeth or on her neck. There were none, nor were there traces of anything left on the floor round the