He Who Whispers (17 page)

‘Supposing her to be – harrumph! – a criminal of some kind, natural or supernatural, would that have any influence on your attitude?'

‘For the love of Mike, are you warning me against her too?'

‘No!' thundered Dr Fell, and made a hideous face and smote his fist on the arm of the chair with remarkable vehemence. ‘On the contrary! If one wool-gathering idea of mine is correct, there are many persons who ought to get down in the dust and beg her pardon. No, sir: I put the question in what Rigaud would call an academic way. Would this (shall we say) make any difference to your attitude?'

‘No, I can't say it would. We don't fall in love with a woman because of her good character.'

‘That,' said Dr Fell, taking a number of reflective puffs at the meerschaum, ‘is an observation none the less true for not being generally admitted. At the same time, this whole situation disturbs me even more. One person's motive (forgive me if I seem cryptic) seems to make nonsense of another person's motive.

‘I questioned Miss Seton last night,' he continued, ‘and I hinted. To-day I propose to question her without hints. But I fear it won't be any good. The best thing to do is perhaps to get in touch with Miss Barbara Morell …'

‘Wait a minute!' Miles rose to his feet. ‘We've got in touch with Barbara Morell! She rang up here not five minutes before you came in!'

‘So?' observed Dr Fell, instantly alert. ‘What did she want?'

‘Come to think of it,' said Miles, ‘I haven't the remotest idea. I forgot to ask her.'

Dr Fell eyed him for a long moment.

‘My boy,' Dr Fell said with an expansive sigh, ‘it is more and more borne in on me that you and I are spiritually kin. I refrain from making frantic comments; that is the sort of thing I always do myself. But what did
you
say? Did you ask her about Jim Morell?'

‘No. Steve Curtis came in just then, and I didn't have time. But I remembered you said it might help us to get the information, so I've arranged to see her to-day in town. I might as well,' Miles added bitterly. ‘Dr Garvice is getting a nurse for Marion, and everyone claims I'm in the way in addition to being the pigheaded swine who introduced the disturbing element into the house.'

Miles was getting lower and lower, blacker and blacker, in his mind and spirit.

‘Fay Seton's not guilty!' he shouted; and he might have gone on to enlarge on this if Dr Laurence Garvice himself, with a bowler hat in one hand and a medicine-case in the other, had not put his head in at the doorway to the reception hall.

Dr Garvice, a middle-aged, pleasant-faced man with a grizzled head and a scrubbed antiseptic manner, obviously had something on his mind. He hesitated before coming in.

‘Mr Hammond,' he said, giving a half-smile to Miles and Dr Fell, ‘before I see the patient again, I wonder if I could have a word with you?'

‘Yes, of course. Don't hesitate to speak in front of Dr Fell.' Dr Garvice closed the door behind him and turned round.

‘Mr Hammond,' he said, ‘I wonder whether you would mind telling me what frightened the patient?'

Then he held up his hand with the bowler hat.

‘I ask,' he went on, ‘because this is the worst case of plain nervous shock in my experience. That's to say, there's often, nearly always, severe shock attendant on physical injury. But there's no physical injury of any kind.' He hesitated. ‘Is the lady of a highly strung type?'

‘No,' said Miles. He felt his throat contract.

‘No, I shouldn't have thought so myself. Medically she's as sound as a bell.' There was a little pause, faintly sinister. ‘Apparently someone tried to get at her from outside the window?'

‘That's the trouble, Doctor. We don't know what happened.'

‘Oh. I see. I was hoping you could tell me. – There's no other sign of … burglars being here?'

‘None that I've noticed.'

‘Have you informed the police?'

‘Good God, no!' Miles blurted this out, and then steadied himself to casualness. ‘You can understand, Doctor, that we don't want the police mixed up in this.'

‘Yes. No doubt.' With his eye on the pattern of the carpet, Dr Garvice slowly tapped his bowler hat against his leg. ‘The lady doesn't suffer from – hallucinations?'

‘No. Why do you ask?'

‘Well,' and the physician lifted his eyes, ‘she keeps on muttering, over and over, about something whispering to her.'

‘
Whispering
?'

‘Yes. It rather worries me.'

‘But “whispering”, someone whispering to her, couldn't have caused …?'

‘No. Exactly what I thought myself.'

Whispering …

The eerie word, with its sibilant note, seemed to hang in the air between them. Dr Garvice still tapped his bowler hat slowly against his leg.

‘Well!' He woke up and looked at his wrist-watch. ‘I dare say we shall find out soon enough. In the meantime, as I told you last night, there's nothing to worry about. I was lucky enough to get a nurse, who's outside now.' Dr Garvice turned towards the door. ‘It's very disturbing, though,' he added. ‘I'll look in again when I've seen the patient. And I'd better look in on the other lady too – Miss Seton, isn't it?
She
didn't seem, last night, to have as much blood-colour in her as she should have. Excuse me.'

And the door closed after him.

‘I
SUPPOSE,'
Miles remarked mechanically, ‘I'd better go and see about breakfast for all of us.' But he took only two steps towards the dining-room. ‘Whispering!' he said. ‘Dr Fell, what
is
the answer to all this?'

‘Sir,' returned Dr Fell, ‘I don't know.'

‘Does it give you a clue of any kind?'

‘Unfortunately, no. The vampire –'

‘Need we use that word?'

‘The vampire, in folk-lore, whispered softly to her victim at the beginning of the influence that threw the victim into a trance. But the point is that no vampire, real or faked,
no
sort of imitation bogy at all, would have had the least effect on your sister. That is correct?'

‘I'd swear to it. Last night I gave you an instance to prove it. For Marion' – he tried to find the right words – ‘such things just didn't enter her mind.'

‘You'd call her completely unimaginative?'

‘That's a strong word to use about anybody. But certainly she's completely contemptuous of
that
. When I tried to talk to her about the supernatural, she made me sound foolish even to myself. And when I talked about Count Cagliostro …'

‘Cagliostro?' Dr Fell blinked at him. ‘Apropos what? Oh, ah! I see! Rigaud's book?'

‘Yes. According to Fay Seton, Marion seems to have got a quite sincere if hazy idea that Cagliostro was a personal friend of mine.'

Dr Fell's scatterbrain had been set off again. He leaned back in the chair, his pipe gone out, and dreamily contemplated a corner of the ceiling for so long a time that Miles thought he must be a victim of catalepsy until Miles saw the far-away twinkle which began in the doctor's eye, the vast sleepy beam which overspread his face, the series of chuckles which gradually ran up the ridges of his waistcoat.

‘It's a fascinating subject, you know,' mused Dr Fell.

‘Vampires?' said Miles bitterly.

‘Cagliostro,' replied Dr Fell.

He gestured with his pipe.

‘Now there is a historical character,' he continued, ‘whom I have always detested and yet obscurely admired. The tubby little Italian, the eye-roller, “Count Front-of-Brass”, who claimed to be two thousand years old from drinking his own elixir of life! The wizard, the alchemist, the healer! Moving across the screen of the late eighteenth century in a red waistcoat covered with diamonds! Aweing kings' courts from Paris to St Petersburg! Founding his cult of Egyptian Masonry, to which women were admitted, and addressing his female disciples with everybody
in puris naturalibus
! Making gold! Prophesying the future! And, incredibly, getting away with it!

‘The man was never exposed, you remember. His ruin came about through that business of Marie Antoinette's diamond necklace, in which the count had no concern whatever.

‘But I think his most intriguing exploit was his Banquet of the Dead, at the mysterious house in the rue St Claude, where the ghosts of six great men were gravely summoned from the shadows to sit down at dinner with six living guests.

‘ “
At first
,” writes one biographer, “
conversation did not flow freely
.” This seems to me one of the classic understatements. My own conversation would have dried up, would positively have petrified, if I found myself at a dinner-table requesting Voltaire to pass the salt or asking the Duc de Choiseul how he liked the quality of the spam. And at this dinner the ghosts themselves seem to have been rather embarrassed as well, to judge by the quality of their talk.

‘No, sir. Let me repeat that I don't like Count Cagliostro; I dislike his swagger as I dislike any man's swagger. But I will concede that he had a notion of doing things handsomely. England too, that home of quacks and impostors, has a great claim on him.'

Miles Hammond, professionally interested in spite of himself, interjected a protest.

‘England?'
Miles repeated. ‘Did you say England?'

‘I did.'

‘If I remember correctly, Cagliostro did visit London on two occasions. They were very unfortunate occasions for him …'

‘Ah!' agreed Dr Fell. ‘But it was in London that he was initiated into the secret society which gave him the idea for his own secret society later. The present-day Magic Circle ought to go round to Gerrard Street, to what used to he the King's Head Tavern, and put up a plaque. Gerrard Street! Oh, ah! Yes! Very close, by the way, to Beltring's Restaurant where we were to meet two nights ago, and Miss Barbara Morell said …'

Suddenly Dr Fell paused.

His hands went to his forehead. The meerschaum pipe dropped unheeded out of his mouth, bounced against his knee, and rolled to the floor. Afterwards he seemed to congeal into a figure so motionless that not even a wheeze of breath could be heard.

‘Pray forgive me,' he said presently, and took his hands away from his forehead. ‘Absence of mind has some use in this world after all. I think I've got it.'

‘Got what?' Miles shouted.

‘I know what frightened your sister. – Let me alone for a moment!' Dr Fell pleaded, with a wild look and an almost piteous voice. ‘Her body was relaxed! Completely relaxed! We saw it for ourselves! And yet at the same time …'

‘Well? What about it?'

‘Done by design,' Dr Fell said. ‘Done by deliberate, brutal design.' He looked startled. ‘And that must mean, God help us, that –!'

Again realization came into his mind, realization of something else, this time slowly, like an exploring light from room to room. It was as though Miles could follow the workings of his brain, read the moving eyes (for Dr Fell has not a poker face) without seeing quite past that last nightmarish door to what lay beyond.

‘Let's go upstairs,' Dr Fell said at length, ‘and see if there is any proof that I'm right.'

Miles nodded. In silence he followed Dr Fell, who now leaned heavily on his crutch-handled stick, up to Marion's bedroom. From the doctor radiated a shaggy glow of certainty, a fiery energy, which made Miles sure that a barrier
had
been passed. Henceforward, Miles felt, there was danger. Henceforward they were racing towards trouble. Here's a malignant force, and Dr Fell knows what it is; we'll kill it, or it will kill us, but look to yourself! – because the game has begun.

Dr Fell tapped at the bedroom door, which was opened by a youngish nurse in uniform.

Inside the room was dim and a little stuffy, despite sunlight and clean air. The thin blue, gold-figured curtains had been drawn across both sets of windows; and, with black-out curtains removed weeks ago, a faint dazzle of sun showed beyond. Marion, asleep, lay tidily in a tidy bed and room which showed already the touch of the professional nurse. The nurse herself, carrying a hand wash-basin, moved back from opening the door. Stephen Curtis, a pitiable man, stood with hunched shoulders by the chest-of-drawers. And Dr Garvice, who was just on the point of leaving after his examination, looked round surprised.

Dr. Fell walked up to him.

‘Sir,' he began in a voice which arrested the attention of everyone there, ‘last night you did me the honour to say you were familiar with my name.'

The other bowed, faintly inquiring.

‘I am not,' said Dr Fell, ‘a physician; nor have I any medical knowledge beyond that which might be possessed by any man in the street. You may refuse the request I am about to make. You would have every right to do so. But I should like to examine your patient.'

And now showed the inner, troubled state of Dr Laurence Garvice's mind. He glanced towards the bed.

‘Examine the patient?' Dr Garvice repeated.

‘I should like to examine her neck and her teeth.'

Pause.

‘But, my dear sir!' protested the physician, his voice going up loudly before he checked it. ‘There isn't a wound or a mark anywhere on the lady's body!'

‘Sir,' replied Dr Fell, ‘I am aware of that.'

‘And if you're thinking of a drug, or something like that …!'

‘I know,' announced Dr Fell carefully, ‘that Miss Hammond was not physically hurt. I know that no question arises of a drug or any kind of toxic agent. I know her condition is caused by fear and nothing else. But still I should like to examine her neck and teeth.'

The physician made a half-helpless gesture with his bowler hat.

‘Go ahead,' he said. ‘Miss Peters! You might open the curtains just a little. Please excuse
me
. I'm off to look in on Miss Seton downstairs.'