He Who Whispers

bed.

“In the bedroom, a study in frightened woe again presented itself in the person of 'Mr. Stephen Curtis.' Why should 'Stephen Curtis' be interested in trying to kill a total stranger like Fay Seton, with a trick taken from the life of Cagliostro?

“Cagliostro suggested Professor Rigaud. Professor Rigaud suggested Harry Brooke, whom he had tutored in matters of . . .

“Oh Lord! Oh Bacchus!

“It wasn't possible 'Stephen Curtis' might be Harry Brooke?

“No, fantastic! Harry Brooke was dead. A truce to this nonsense!

“At the same time, while I vainly looked round the carpet for traces left by the murderer, some whisk of scatterbrained intelligence kept on working. I suddenly occurred to me that I was overlooking evidence which had been under my nose since last night.

“A shot was fired in here, the would-be murderer using for business gun the .32 Ives-Grant he must have known Marion Hammond kept in the bedside table ('Curtis' again), and for empty gun any old weapon he brought along. Very well!

“At some time following the shot, Miss Fay Seton slipped up to this bedroom and peeped in. She saw something which upset her badly. She wasn't frightened, mind you. No! It was caused by . . .”

Miles Hammond intervened.

“Shall I tell you, Dr. Fell?” he suggested, “I talked to Fay in the kitchen, where I was boiling water. She'd just come from the bedroom. Her expression was hatred: hatred, mixed with a kind of wild anguish. At the end of the conversation she burst out with, 'This can't go on!'”

Dr. Fell nodded.

“And she also told you, as I am now aware,” Dr. Fell inquired, “that she'd just seen something she hadn't noticed before?”

“Yes. That's right.”

“What, then, could she have noticed in Marion Hammond's bedroom? That was what I asked myself in that same bedroom: in the presence of yourself, and Dr. Garvice, and the nurse, and 'Stephen Curtis.'

“After all, Fay Seton had been in that room for quite a long while on Saturday night, talking to Miss Hammond, evidently without seeing anything strange on her first visit to the room.

“Then I remembered that eerie conversation I had with her later the same night—out at the end of the passage, in the moonlight—when her whole attitude burned with a repressed emotion that made her smile, once or twice, like a vampire. I remembered the queer reply she made to one of my questions, when I was asking her about her visit during which she talked to Marion Hammond.

“'Mostly,' said Fay Seton in referring to Marion, 'she did the talking, about her fiance and her brother and her plans for the future.' Then Fay, for no apparent reason, added these inconsequential words: 'The lamp was on the bedside table; did I tell you?”

“Lamp? That reference jarred me at the time. And now . . .

“After Marion Hammond was found ostensibly dead, there were two lamps taken into the room. One was carried by you”--he looked at Professor Rigaud—“ and the other” he looked at Miles—“was carried by you. Think, now, both of you! Where did you set those lamps down?”

“I do not follow this!” cried Rigaud. “My lamp, of course, I placed on the bedside table beside one that is not burning.”

“And you?” demanded Dr. Fell of Miles.

“I'd just been told,” replied Miles, staring at the past, “that Marion was dead. I was holding up the lamp, and my whole arm started to shake so that I couldn't hold it any longer. I went across and put the lamp down—on the chest-of drawers.”

“Ah!” murmured Dr. Fell. “And now tell me, if you please, what was also on that chest-of-drawers?”

“A big leather picture-frame, containing a big photograph of Marion one one side and a big photograph of 'Steve' on the other. I remember he lamp threw a strong light on those pictures, though that side of the room had been darkish before, and—”

Miles broke off in realization. Dr. Fell nodded.

“A photograph of 'Stephen Curtis,' brilliantly lighted,” sad Dr. Fell. “That was what Fay Seton saw, staring at her from the room as she peeped in at the doorway after the shot. It explained her whole attitude.

“She knew. By thunder, she knew!

“Probably she didn't at all guess how the Cagliostro trick had been worked. But she did know the attempt had been made on her and not on Marion Hammond, because she knew who was behind it. Marion Hammond's fiance was Harry Brooke.

“And that finished it. That was the last straw. That really did make her with with hatred and anguish. Once more she had tried to find a new life, new surroundings; she had been decent; she had forgiven Harry Brooke and concealed the evidence against him about his father's murder; and destiny still won't leave off hounding her. Destiny, or some damnable force which has it in for her, has brought Harry Brooke back from nowhere to try to take her life . . .”

Dr. Fell coughed.

“I have bored you with this at some length,” he apologized, “though the process of thinking it took perhaps three seconds while I wool-gathered in that bedroom in the presence of Miles Hammond, and the doctor, and the nurse, and 'Curtis' himself, who was standing by the chest-of-drawers then.

“To determine whether I was right about the Cagliostro-trick, it further occurred to me, should be very simple. There is a scientific test, called the Gonzales test or the nitrate test, by which you can infallibly prove whether a given hand did or id not fire a given revolver.

“If Marion Hammond hadn't pulled that trigger, I could write Q.E.D. And if Harry Brooke did happen to be dead as they claimed, it looked as though the crime must have been committed by an evil spirit.

“I somewhat impudently announced this, to the annoyance of Dr. Garvice, who responded by slinging us all out of the bedroom. But there were some interesting repercussion immediately afterwards.

“My first move, of course, was to put Miss Fay Seton in a corner and make her admit all this. I asked Dr. Garvice, in the presence of 'Curtis,' whether he would be good enough to send Miss Seton up to see me. There followed, from 'Curtis,' an outburst of nerves which shocked even you.

“Suddenly he realized he was wasting time; the girl might be up here any minute. He must get away out of sight. He said he was going to his room to lie down, and—bang! I could have laughed, you know, if the whole thing hadn't been so grotesquely wicked and bitter. No sooner did 'Stephen Curtis' touch his bedroom door, than you shouted to him not to go in there, because Professor Rigaud—who also knew Harry Brooke—was asleep and mustn't be disturbed!

“No, by thunder! He mustn't be disturbed! “Do you wonder, again that 'Curtis' plunged down the back stairs as though the devil were after him?

“But I had little time to speculate about this, because Dr Garvice returned with some information which thoroughly scared me. Fay Seton had gone. The note she left, especially that line, 'A brief-case is so useful, isn't it?' let the cat out of the bag: or, more properly, the raincoat out of the brief-case.

“I knew what she was going to do. I had been a prize idiot for not realizing it the night before.

“When I had told Fay Seton that if Miss Hammond recovered this matter would be no concern of the police, that was where she had smiled in so terrifying a way and murmured, 'Won't it?' Fay Seton was sick and tired and ready to blow up.

“At her room in town she had the evidence which could still send Harry Brooke to the guillotine. She was damned well going to get it, return with it, throw it in our faces, and call for an arrest.

“And so—look out!

“The alleged Stephen Curtis was really desperate. If he used his head, he wasn't dished even yet. When he crept up there in the dark, and played the Cagliostro trick, Marion hadn't seen him and hadn't heard any voice except a whisper. She would never have thought (and didn't, when we talked to her later) that the attacker was her own fiance. Nobody else had seen him; he had slipped into the house by the back door, up the back staircase,