He Who Whispers

He Who Whispers

Copyright, 1946 by John Dickson Carr

I

A dinner of the Murder Club―our first meeting in more than five years―will be held at Beltring’s Restaurant on Friday. June 1st, at 8:30 p.m. The speaker will be Professor Rigaud. Guests have not hitherto been permitted; but if you, my dear Hammond, would care to come along as my guest . . . ?

That, he thought, was a sign of the times.

A fine rain was falling, less a rain than a sort of greasy mist, when Miles Hammond turned off Shaftesbury Avenue into Dean Street. Though you could tell little from the darkened sky, it must be close on half-past nine o’clock. To be invited to a dinner of the Murder Club, and then to get there nearly an hour late, was more than mere discourtesy; it was infernal, unpardonable cheek even though you had a good reason.

And yet, as he reached the first turning where Romilly Street trails along the outskirts of Soho, Miles Hammond stopped.

A sign of the times, the letter in his pocket. A sign in this year nineteen-forty-five, that peace had crept back unwillingly to Europe. And he couldn’t get used to it.

Miles looked round him.

On his left, as he stood at the corner of Romilly Street, was the east wall of St. Anne’s Church. The grey wall, with its big round-arched window, stood up almost intact. But there was no glass in the window, and nothing beyond except a grey-white tower seen through it. Where high explosive had ripped along Dean Street, making chaos of matchboard houses and spilling strings of garlic into the road along with broken glass and mortar-dust, they had now built a neat static-water tank―with barbed wire so that children shouldn’t fall in and get drowned. But the scars remained, under whispering rain. On the east wall of St. Anne’s, just under that gaping window, was an old plaque commemorating the sacrifice of those who died in the last war.

Unreal!

No, Miles Hammond said to himself, it was no good calling this feeling morbid or fanciful or a product of war-nerves. His whole life now, good fortune as well as bad, was unreal.

Long ago you enter the Army, with a notion that solid walls are crumbling and that something must be done about it somehow. You get, numerically, that form of Diesel-oil poisoning which in the Tank Corps is nevertheless as deadly as anything Jerry throws at you. For eighteen months you lie in a hospital bed, between white galling sheets, with a passage of time so slow that time itself grows meaningless. And then, when the trees are coming into leaf for the second time, they write and tell you that Uncle Charles has died―cosily as always, in a safe hotel in Devon―and that you and your sister have inherited everything.

Have you always been naggingly short of money? Here’s all you want.

Have you always been fond of that house in the New Forest, with Uncle Charlie’s library attached? Enter!

Have you―far more than either of these things―longed of r freedom from the stifle of crowding, the sheer pressure of humanity like the physical pressure of travelers packed into a bus? Freedom from regimentation, with space to move and breathe again? Freedom to read and dream, without a sense of duty towards anybody and everybody? All this should be possible too, if the war is ever finished.

Then, gasping out to the end like a gauleiter swallowing poison, the war was is over. You come out of hospital―a little shakily, your discharge-papers in your pocket―into a London still pinched by shortages; a London of long queues, erratic buses, dry pubs; a London where they turn on the street-lights, and immediately turn them off again to save fuel; but a place free at last from the intolerable weight of threats.

People didn’t celebrate that victory hysterically, as for some reason or other the newspapers liked to make out. What the news-reels showed was only a bubble on the huge surface of the town. Like himself, Miles Hammond thought, most people were a little apathetic because they could not yet think of it as real.

There was Beltring’s on the left, four floors once painted white and still faintly whitish in the dusk. Distantly a late bust rumbled in Cambridge Circus, making the street vibrate. Lighted windows gathered strength against the mist of rain, which seemed to splash more loudly here. There, just as of old, was the uniformed commissionaire at the entrance to Beltring’s.

But, if you were to attend a dinner of the Murder Club you did not go in by the front door. Instead you went around the corner, to the side entrance in Greek Street. Beyond a low door, and up a thick-carpeted flight of stairs―according to popular legend, this was once royalty’s discreet way of entering―you emerged into an upstairs passage with the doors of private rooms along one side.

Half-way up the stairs, faintly hearing that rich subdued murmur which is the background of a rich subdued restaurant, Miles Hammond knew a moment of sheer panic.

He was the guest to-night of Dr. Gideon Fell. But, even as a guest, he was none the less an outsider.

This Murder Club had become as famous in legend as the exploits of that scion of royalty whose private stair he was now ascending. The Murder Club’s membership was restricted to thirteen: nine men and four women. The names of its members were celebrated, some all the more celebrated for being unobtrusively so, in law, in literature, in science, in art. Mr. Justice Coleman was a member. So was Dr. Banford, the toxicologist, and Merridew, the novelist, and Dame Ellen Nye, the actress.

Before the war they were accustomed to meet four times a year, in two private rooms at Beltring’s always assigned to them by Frederic, the head-waiter. There was an outer room with an improvised bar, and an inner room for the dinner. In the inner room―where Frederic, for the occasion, always hung the engraving of the skull on the wall―these men and women, as solemn as children, sat far into the night discussing murder cases which had come to be known as classics.

Yet here was he, Miles Hammond…

Steady!

Here was he―an outsider, almost an imposter―dripping in his sodden hat and raincoat up the stairs of a restaurant where in the old days he could seldom afford to eat. Scandalously late, feeling shabby in his very bones, nerving himself to face craned necks and inquiring eyebrows as he walked in…

Steady, curse you!

He had to remind himself that once upon a time, in the far-off hazy days before the war, there had been a scholar named Miles Hammond: last of a long line of academic forbears of whom his uncle, Sir Charles Hammond, had only recently died. A scholar names Miles Hammond had won the Nobel Prize for History in nineteen-thirty-eight. And that person, amazingly enough, was himself. He mustn’t let illness gnaw away his nerves. He had every right to be here! But the world is always changing, always altering its shape; and people forget very easily.

In such a mood of cynicism Miles reached the upstairs hall, where discreet lights behind frosted glass shone on polished mahogany doors. It was deserted and quiet, except for a distant murmur of conversation. It might have been Beltring’s before the war. Over one door was an illuminated sign that said, “Gentlemen’s Cloakroom,” and he hung his hat and overcoat inside. Across the hall from it he saw a mahogany door bearing the placard, “Murder Club.”

Miles opened the door, and stopped short.

“Who― A woman’s voice struck across at him, suddenly. It went up with something like a note of alarm, before it regained its soft and casual level. “Excuse me,” the voice added uncertainly, “but who are you?”

“I’m looking for the Murder Club,” said Miles.

“Yes, of course. Only…”

There was something wrong here. Something very wrong.

A girl in a white evening-gown was standing in the middle of the outer room, her gown vivid against thick dark carpet. The room was rather dimly lighted, behind buff shades. Its heavy curtains, obscurely patterned in gold, had been drawn across the two windows facing Romilly Street. A long white-covered table had been pushed in front of these windows to serve as a bar; a bottle of sherry, a bottle of gin and another of bitters, stood beside a dozen polished unused glasses. Except for the girl, there was nobody else in this room.

In the right-hand wall Miles could see double-doors, partly open, leading into the inner room. He could see a big circular table set for dinner, with chairs set stiffly round it; the gleaming silver was ranged just as stiffly; the table decorations, roses, made a scarlet pattern against green ferns on the white cloth; the four tall candles remained unlighted. Over the mantel piece was a sign that the Murder Club was in session.

But the Murder Club was not in session. There was nobody there, either.

Then Miles became conscious that the girl had moved forward.

“I’m awfully sorry,” she said. The low, hesitant voice, infinitely delightful after the professionally pleasant tones of nurses, warmed his heart. “It was very rude of me to shout out like that.”

“Not at all! Not at all!”

“I―I suppose we’d better introduce ourselves.” She raised her eyes. “I’m Barbara Morell.”

Barbara Morell? Barbara Morell? Which one of the celebrities could this be?

For she was young, and she had grey yes. Most of all you were conscious of her extraordinary vitality, her aliveness, in a world grown half bloodless from war. It showed in the sparkle of the grey eyes, the turn of the head and mobility of the lips, the faint pink flush of the skin in face and neck and shoulders above the white gown. How long was it, he wondered, since he had last seen a girl in evening-dress?

And in the face of that―what a scarecrow he must look!

In the wall between the two curtained windows facing Romilly Street there was a long mirror. Miles could see duskily reflected the back of Barbara Morell’s gown, cut off at the waist by the bar-table, and the sleek knot into which she had done her sleek ash-blonde hair. Over her shoulder was reflected his own countenance: gaunt, wry, and humorous, with the high cheek-bones under long red-brown eyes, and the thread of grey in his hair making him seem forty-odd instead of thirty-five; rather like an intellectual Charles the Second, and (God’s fish!) just as unprepossessing.

“I’m Miles Hammond,” he told her, and looked about desperately for someone to whom he could apologize for his lateness.

“Hammond?” There was a slight pause. Her grey eyes were fixed on him, wide open. “You aren’t a member of the club, then?”

“No. ‘m a guest of Dr. Gideon Fell.”

“Of Dr. Fell? So am I! I’m not a member, either. But that’s just the trouble.” Miss Barbara Morell spread out her hands. “Not a single member has turned up tonight. The whole club has just… disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

“Yes.”

Miles stared round the room.

“There’s nobody here,” the girl explained, “except you and me and Professor Rigaud. Frederic the head-waiter is nearly frantic, and as for Professor Rigaud…well!” She broke off. “Why are you laughing?”

Miles had not meant to laugh. In any case, he told himself, you could hardly call it laughing.

“I beg your pardon,” he hastened to say. “I was only thinking―

“Thinking what?”

“Well! For years this club has been meeting, each time with a different speaker to give them the inside story of some celebrated horror. They’ve discussed crime: They’ve revelled in crime; they’ve even hung the picture of a skull on the wall as their symbol.”

“Yes?”

He was watching the line of her hair, hair of such pale ash-blonde that it seemed almost white, parted in the middle after what seemed to him an old-fashioned manner. He met the upturned grey eyes, with their dark lashes and dead-black points of iris. Barbara Morell pressed her hands together. She had an eager way of gibing you her whole attention, of seeming to hang on every word you uttered, very flattering to the scarred nerves of a man in convalescence.

He grinned at her.

“I was only thinking,” he answered, “that it would be a triumph of sensationalism if on the night o this meeting each member of the club mysteriously disappeared from his home. Or if each were found, as the clock struck, sitting quietly at home with a knife in his back.”

The attempt at a joke fell flat. Barbara Morell changed colour slightly.

“What a horrible idea!”

“Is it? I’m sorry. I only meant…”

“Do you by any chance write detective stories?”

“No. But I read a lot of them. That is―oh, well!”

“This is serious,” she assured him, with a small-girl naiveté and still a heightened colour in her face. “After all, Professor Rigaud has come a very long distance to tell them about this case, this murder on the tower; and then they treat him like this! Why?”

Suppose something had happened? It was incredible, it was fantastic, yet anything seemed possible when the whole evening was unreal. Miles pulled his wits together.

“Can’t we do something about finding out what’s wrong?” he demanded. “Can’t we telephone?”

“They have telephoned!”

“To whom?”

“To Dr. Fell; he’s the Honorary Secretary. But there wasn’t any reply. Now Professor Rigaud is trying to get in touch with the President, this judge, Mr. Justice Coleman…”

It became clear, however, that he had not been able to get in touch with the President of the Murder Club. The door to the hall opened, with a sort of silent explosion, and Professor Rigaud came in.

Georges Antoine Rigaud, Professor of French literature at the University of Edinburgh, had a savage catlike roll in his gait. He was short an stout; he was bustling; he was a little untidy, from bow tie and shiny dark suit to square-toed shoes. His hair showed very black above the ears, in contrast to a large bald head and a faintly purplish complexion. In general, Professor Rigaud varied between a portentous intensity of manner and a sudden expansive chuckle which showed the gleam of a gold tooth.

But no expansiveness was in evidence now. His thin shells of eyeglasses, even his patch of black moustache, seemed to tremble with rigid indignation. His voice was gruff and husky, his English almost without accent. He held up a hand, palm outwards.

“Do not speak to me, please,” he said.

On the seat of a pink-brocaded chair against the wall lay a soft dark hat with a flopping brim, and a thick cane with a curved handle. Professor Rigaud bustled over and pounced on them.

His manner was now one of high tragedy.

“For years,” he said, before straightening up, “they have asked me to come to this club. I say to them: No, no, no!―because I do not like journalists. ‘There will be no journalists,’ they tell me, ‘to quote what you say.’ ‘You promise that?’ I ask. ‘Yes!’ they say. Now I have come all the way from Edinburgh. And I could not get a sleeper on the train, either, because of ‘priority.’” He straightened up and shook a bulky arm in the air. “This word priority is a word which stinks in the nostrils of honest men!”

“Hear, hear, hear,”said Miles Hammond with fervour.

Professor Rigaud woke up from his indignant dream, fixing Miles with a hard little glittering eye from behind the thin shells of glasses.

“You agree, my friend?”

“Yes!”

“That is god of you. You are―?”

“No,” Miles answered his unspoken question, “I’m not a missing member of the club. I’m a guest too. My name is Hammond.”

“Hammond?” repeated the other. Interest and suspicion quickened in his eye. “You are not Sir Charles Hammond?”

“No. Sir Charles Hammond was my uncle. He …”

“Ah, but of course!” Professor Rigaud snapped his fingers. “Sir Charles Hammond is dead. Yes, yes, yes! I read of this in the newspapers. You have a sister. You and your sister have inherited the library.”

Barbara Morell, Miles noticed, was looking more than a little perplexed.

“My uncle,” he said to her, “was a historian. He lived for years in a little house in the New Forest, accumulating thousands of books piled up in the wildest and craziest disorder. As a matter of fact, my main reason for coming to London was to see whether I couldn’t get a trained librarian to put the books in order. But Dr. Fell invited me to the Murder Club . . .”

“The library!” breathed Professor Rigaud. “The library!”

A strong inner excitement seemed to kindle and expand inside him like steam, making his chest swell and his complexion a trifle more purplish.

“That man Hammond,” he declared with enthusiasm, “was a great man! He was curious! He was alert! He”―Professor Rigaud twisted his wrist, as one who turns a key―pried into things! To examine his library I would give much. To examine his library I would give . . . But I forgot. I am furious.” He clapped on his hat. “I will go now.”

“Professor Rigaud,” the girl called softly.

Miles Hammond, always sensitive to atmospheres, was conscious of a slight shock. For some reason there had been a subtle change in the attitude of both his companions, or so it seemed to him, ever since he had mentioned his uncle’s house in the New Forest. He could not analyse this; perhaps he had imagined it.

But when Barbara Morell suddenly clenched her hands and called out, there could be no doubt about the desperate urgency in her tone.

“Professor Rigaud! Pleas! Couldn’t we―couldn’t we hold the meeting of the Murder Club after all?”

“Mademoiselle?”

“They’ve treated you badly. I know that.” She hurried forward. The half-smile on her lips contrasted with the appeal in the eyes. “But I’ve looked forward so to coming here! This case he was going to talk about”―briefly, she appealed to Miles―was rather special and sensational. It happened in France just before the war, and Professor Rigaud is one of the few remaining people who know anything about it. It’s all about . . .”

“It is about,” said Professor Rigaud, “the influence of a certain woman on human lives.”

“Mr. Hammond and I would make an awfully good audience. And we wouldn’t breathe a word to the press, either of us! And after all, you know, we’ve got to dine somewhere; and I doubt whether we could get anything at all to eat if we left her. Couldn’t we, Professor Rigaud? Couldn’t we? Couldn’t we?”

Frederic the head-waiter, dispirited and angry and sorry, slipped unobtrusively through the half-opened door to the hall, making a flicking motion of the fingers to someone who hovered outside.

“Dinner is served,” he said.

Chapter II

The story told them by Georges Antoine Rigaud―over the coffee, following an indifferent dinner―Miles Hammond was at first inclined to dismiss as a fable, a dream, an elaborate leg-pull. This was partly because of Professor Rigaud’s expression: one of portentous French solemnity, shooting little glances from one of his companions to the other, yet with a huge sardonic amusement behind everything he said.

Afterwards, of course, Miles discovered that every word was true. But by that time . . .

It was muffled and quiet in the little dining-room, with the four tall candles burning on the table as its only light. They had drawn back the curtains and opened the windows, to let in a little air on that stuffy night. Outside the rain still splashed, against a purplish dusk spotted with one or two lighted windows in the red-painted restaurant across the street.

It formed a fitting background for what they were about to hear.

“Crime and the occult!” Professor Rigaud had declared, flourishing his knife and fork. “These are the only hobbies for a man of taste!” He looked very hard at Barbara Morell. “You collect, mademoiselle?”

An eddying breeze, moist-scented, curled in through the open windows and made the candle-flames undulate. Moving shadows were thrown across the girl’s face.

“Collect?” she repeated.

“Criminal relics?”

“Good heavens, no!”

“There is a man in Edinburgh,” said Professor Rigaud rather wistfully, “who has a pen-wiper made of human skin, from the body of Burke, the body-snatcher. Do I shock you? But as God is my judge”―and suddenly he chuckled, showing his gold tooth, and then became very serious again―I could name you a lady, a very charming lady like yourself, who stole the headstone from the grave of Dougal, the Moat Farm murderer, at Chelmsford Prison; and has the headstone set up in her garden now.”

“Excuse me,” said Miles. “But do all students of crime…well, carry on like that?”

Professor Rigaud considered this.

“It is a blague, yes,” he conceded. “But all the same it is amusing. As for myself, I will show you presently.”

He said no more until the table was cleared and the coffee poured. The, lighting a cigar with concentration, he hitched his chair forward and put his thick elbows on the table. His cane, of polished yellow wood which shone under the candlelight, was propped against his leg.

“Outside the little city of Chartres, which is some sixty-odd kilometers south of Paris, there lived in the year nineteen-thirty-nine a certain English family. You are perhaps familiar with Chartres?”

“One thinks of the place as medieval, as all black stone and a dream of the past, and in a sense that is true. You see it in the distance, on a hill, amid miles of yellow grain-fields, with the unequal towers of the Cathedral rising up. You enter through the round-towers of the Porte Guillaume where geese and chickens fly in front of your motor-car, and go up steep little cobbled streets to the Hotel of the Grand Monarch.

“At the foot of the hill winds the River Eure, with the old wall of the fortifications overhanging t, and willows drooping into the water. You see people walking on these walls, in the cool of the evening, where the peach-trees grow.

“On market-days―ouf! The noise of cattle is like the devil blowing horns. There are absurdities to buy, at lines of stalls where the vendors sound as loud as the cattle. There are”―Professor Rigaud hesitated slightly―superstitions her, as much a part of the soil as moss on rock. You eat the best bread in France, you drink good wine. And you say to yourself, ‘Ah! This is the place to settle down and write a book.’

“But there are industries here: milling, and iron-founding, and stained-glass, and leather manufacture, and others I do no investigate because they bore me. I mention them because the largest of the leather manufactories, Pelletier et Cie., was owned by an Englishman, Mr. Howard Brooke.

“Mr. Brooke is fifty years old, and his happy wife is perhaps five years younger. They have one son, Harry, in his middle twenties. All are dead now, so I may speak of them freely.”

A slight chill―Miles Hammond could not have said why―passed through the little dining-room.

Barbara Morell, who was smoking a cigarette and watching Rigaud in a curious way from behind it, stirred in her chair.

“Dead?” she repeated. “Then no more harm can be done by. . .”

Professor Rigaud ignored this.

“They live, I repeat, a little way outside Chartres. They live in a villa―grandiosely called a chateau, though it is not―on the very bank of the river. Here the Eure is narrow, and still, and dark green with the reflection of its banks. Let us see, now!”

Bustling with concentration, he pushed forward his coffee-cup.

“This,” he announced, “is the villa, built of grey stone round three sides of a courtyard. This”―dipping his finger into the dregs of a glass of claret, Professor Rigaud drew a curved line on the tablecloth―this is the river, winding past in front of it.

“Up here, some two hundred yards northwards from the house, is an arched stone bridge over the river. It is a private bridge; Mr. Brooke owns the land on either side of the Eure. And still farther along from there, but on the opposite bank of the river from the house, stands an old ruined tower.

“This tower is locally known a la Tour d’Henri Quatre, the tower of Henry the Fourth, for absolutely no reason relating to that king. It was once a part of a chateau, burnt down by the Huguenots when they attacked Chartres towards the end of the sixteenth century. Only the tower remains; round, stone-built, its wooden floors burnt out, so that inside it is only a shell with a stone staircase climbing spirally up the wall to a flat stone roof with a parapet.

“The tower―observe!―cannot be seen from this villa where the Brooke family live. But the prospect is pretty, pretty, pretty!

“You walk northwards, through thick grass, past the willows, along the river-bank where it curves here. First there is the stone bridge, mirrored in a glitter of water. Farther on is the tower, overhanging the moss-green bank, round and grey-black with vertical window-slits, perhaps forty feet high, and framed against a distant line of poplars. It is used by the Brooke family as a kind of bathing-hut, to change clothes when they go for a swim.

“So this English family―Mr. Howard the father, Mrs. Georgina the mother, Mr. Harry the son―live in their comfortable villa, happily and perhaps a little stodgily. Until . . .”

“Until?” prompted Miles, as Professor Rigaud paused.

“Until a certain woman arrives.”

Professor Rigaud was silent for a moment.

Then, exhaling his breath, he shrugged the thick shoulders as though disclaiming any responsibility.

“Myself,” he went on, “I arrive in Chartres in May of thirty-nine. I have just finished my Life of Cagliostro,and I wish for peace and quiet. My good friend Coco Legrand, the photographer, introduces me to Mr. Howard Brooke one day on the steps of the hotel de ville. are different types, but we like each other. He smiles at my Frenchness. I smile at his Englishness; and so everybody is happy.

“Mr. Brooke is grey-haired, upright, reserved but friendly, a hardworking executive at his leather business. He wears plus-fours, which seem as strange in Charters as a cure’s skirts in Newcastle. He is hospitable, he has a twinkle in the eye, but he is so conventional you can bet your shilling on exactly what he will do or say at any time. His wife, a plump, pretty, red-faced woman, is much the same.

“But the son Harry…

“Ah! There is a different person!

“This Harry interested me. He has sensitiveness, he has imagination. In height and weight and way of carrying himself he is much like his father. But under that correct outside of his, he is all wires and all nerves.

“He is a good-looking young fellow, too: square jaw, straight nose, good wide-spaced brown eyes, and fair hair that (I think to myself) will be grey like his father’s if he does not control his nerves. Harry is the idol of both his parents. I tell you I have seen doting fathers and mothers, but never any like those two!

“Because Harry can swipe a golf-ball two hundred yards, or two hundred miles, or whatever is the asinine distance, Mr. Brooke is purple with pride. Because Harry plays tennis like a maniac in the hot sun, and has a row of silver cups, his father is in the seventh heaven. He does not mention this to Harry. He only says, ‘Not bed, not bad.’ But he brags about it interminably to anybody who will listen.

“Harry is being trained in the leather business. He will inherit the factory one day; he will be a very rich man like his father. He is sensible; he knows his duty. And yet this boy wants to go to Paris and study painting.

“My God, how he wants it! He wants it so much he is inarticulate. Mr. Brooke is gently firm with this nonsense about becoming a painter. He is broad-minded, he says; painting is all very well as a hobby’ but as a serious occupation―really, now! As for Mrs. Brooke, she is almost hysterical on the subject, since the impression in her mind is that Harry will live in an attic among beautiful girls without any clothes on.

“’My boy,’ says the father, ‘I understand exactly how you feel. I went through a similar phase at your age. But in ten years’ time you will laugh at this.’

“’After all,’ says the mother, ‘couldn’t you always stay at home and paint animals?’

“After which Harry goes out blindly and hit’s a tennis-ball so hard he blows his opponent off the court, or sits on the lawn with a white-faced, brooding, swearing look. These people are all so honest, so well-meaning, so thoroughly sincere!

“I never learned, I tell you now, whether Harry was serious about his life’s work. I never had the opportunity to learn. For in late May of that year, Mr. Brooke’s personal secretary―a hard-faced, middle-aged woman named Mrs. McShane―grows alarmed at the international situation and returns to England.

“Now that was serious. Mr. Brooke’s private correspondence―his personal secretary has no connection with the work at the office―is enormous. Ouf! Often it made my head swim, how that man wrote letters! His investments, his charities, his friends, his letters to the newspapers in England: he would pace up and down as he dictated, his hands behind his back, grey-haired and bony-faced, with a look of stern moral indignation about his mouth.

“As a personal secretary he must have the very best. He wrote to England for the best. And there arrived at Beauregard―that is what the Brookes called their house―there arrived at Beauregard, Miss Fay Seton.

“Miss Fay Seton…

“It was on the afternoon of the thirtieth of May, I remember. I was taking tea with the Brookes. Here was Beauregard, a grey stone house of the early eighteenth century, with stone faces carved on the walls and white-painted window-frames, built around three sides of a front courtyard. We were sitting in the court, which is paved with smooth grass, having tea in the shadow of the house.

“In front of us was the fourth wall, pierced by big iron-grilled gates that stood open. Beyond these gates lay the road that ran past, and beyond this a long grassy bank sloping down to the river fringed with willows.

“Papa Brooke sits in a wicker chair, his shell-rimmed spectacles on his nose, grinning as he holds out a piece of biscuit for the dog. In English households there is always a dog. To the English it is a source of perpetual astonishment and delight that a dog has sense enough to sit up and ask for food.

“However!”

“There is Papa Brooke, and the dog is a dark-grey Scotch terrier like an animated wire brush. On the other side of the tea-table sits Mama Brooke―with brown bobbed hair, pleasant and ruddy of face, not very smartly dressed―pouring out a fifth cup of tea. At one side stands Harry, in a sports-coat and flannels, practicing golf-strokes with a driver against an imaginary ball.

“The tops of the trees faintly moving―a French summer!―and the noise of the leaves rippling and rustling, and the sun that winks on them, and fragrance of grass and flowers, and all the drowsy peacefulness―it makes you close your eyes even to think of. . .

“That was when a Citroën taxi rolled up outside the front gates.

“A young woman got out of the taxi, and paid the driver so generously that he followed her in with her baggage. She walked up the path towards us, diffidently. She said her name was Miss Fay Seton, and that she was the new secretary.

“Attractive? Grand ciel!

“Please to remember―you will excuse my admonitory forefinger―please to remember, however, that I was not conscious of this full attractiveness at first, or all at once. No. For she had the quality, then and always, of being unobtrusive.

“I remember her standing in the path on that first day, while Papa Brooke punctiliously introduced her to everybody including the dog, and Mama Brooke asked her whether she wanted to go upstairs and wash. She was rather tall, and soft and slender, wearing some tailored costume that was unobtrusive too. Her neck was slender; she had heavy, smooth, dark-red hair; her eyes were long and blue and dreaming, with a smile in them, though they seldom seemed to look at you directly.

“Harry Brooke did not say anything. But he took another swing at an imaginary golf-ball, so that there was a swish and a whick as the club head flicked cropped grass.

“So I smoked my cigar―being always, always, always violently curious about human behaviour―and I said to myself, ‘Aha!’

“For this young woman grew on you. It was ode and perhaps a bit weird. Her spiritual good looks, her soft movements, above all her extraordinary aloofness. . .

“Fay Seton was, in every sense of your term, a lady: though she seemed rather to conceal this and be frightened of it. She came of a very good family, old impoverished stock in Scotland, and Mr. Brooke discovered this and it impressed him powerfully. She had not been trained as a secretary; no, she had been trained as something else.” Professor Rigaud chuckled and eyed his auditors keenly. “’But she was quick and efficient, and deft and cool-looking. If they wanted a fourth at bridge, or someone to sing and play at the piano when the lamps were lighted in the evening, Fay Seton would oblige. In her way she was friendly, though shy and somewhat prudish, and she would often sit looking into the distance, far away. And you thought to yourself, in exasperation: what is this girl thinking about?

“That blazing hot summer . . .!

“When the very water of the river seemed thick and turgid under the sun, and there was a wiry hum of crickets after nightfall: I am never likely to forget it, now.

“Like a sensible person Fay Seton id not indulge much in athletics, but this was really because she had a weak heart. I told you of the stone bridge, and of the ruined tower they used as a bathing-hut when they went for a swim. Once or twice only she went for a swim―tall and slender, her red hair done up under a rubber cap; exquisite―with Harry Brooke encouraging her. He rowed her on the river, he took her to the cinema to hear MM. Laurel and Hardy speaking perfect French, he walked with her in those dangerous romantic groves of Eure-et-Loire

“It was obvious to me that Harry would fall in love with her. It was not, you understand, quite so quick as in the delicious description of Anatole France’s story: ‘I love you! What is your name?’ But it was quick enough.

“One night in June Harry came to me in my room at the Hotel of the Grand Monarch. He would never speak to his parents. But he poured out confessions to me: perhaps because, as I smoke my cigar and say little, I am sympathetic. I had been teaching him to read our great romantic writers, moulding his mind towards sophistication, and it may be in a sense playing the devil’s advocate. His parents would not have been pleased.

“On this night, at first, he would only stand by the window and fiddle with an ink-bottle until he had upset it. But at last he blurted out what he had com to say.

“’I’m mad about her,’ he said. ‘I’ve asked her to marry me.’

“’Well?’ said I.

“’She won’t have me,’ cries Harry―and for a second I thought, quite seriously, he was going to dive out of the open window.

“Now this astonished me: the statement, I mean, and not any suggestion of love-sick despair. For I could have sworn that Fay Seton was moved and drawn towards this young man. That is, I could have sworn it as far as one could read that enigmatic expression of hers: The long-lidded blue eyes that would not look directly at you, the elusive and spiritual quality of remoteness.

“’Your technique, perhaps it is clumsy.’

“’I don’t know anything about that,’ said Harry, hitting his fist on the table where he had upset the ink-bottle. ‘But last night I went walking with her, on the river bank. It was moonlight. . .”

“’I know.

“’And I told Fay I loved her. I kissed her mouth and her throat’―hah! That is significant―until I nearly went out of my mind. Then I asked her to marry me. She went as white as a ghost in the moonlight, and said, ‘No, no, no!’ as though I’d said something that horrified her. A second later she ran away from me, over into the shadow of that broken tower.

“’All the time I’d been kissing her, Professor Rigaud, Fay had stood there as rigid as a statue. It made me feel pretty sick, I can tell you. Even though I knew I wasn’t worthy of her. So I followed her over to the tower, through the weeds, and asked whether she was in love with anybody else. She gave a kind of gasp and said no, of course not. I asked her whether she didn’t like me, and she admitted she did. So I said I wouldn’t give up hoping. And I won't give up hoping.’

“Enfin!

“That was what Harry Brooke told me, standing by the window of my hotel room. It puzzled me still more, since this young woman Fay Seton was obviously a woman in every sense of the word. I spoke consolingly to Harry. I said to him that he must have courage; and that doubtless, if he used tact, he could get round her.

“He did get round her. It was not three weeks later when Harry triumphantly announced―to me, and to his parents―that he was engaged to be married to Fay Seton.

“Privately, I do not think Papa Brooke and Mama Brooke were too well pleased.

“Mark you, it was not that a word could be said against this girl. Or against her family, or her antecedents, or her reputation. ! To any eye she was suitable. She might be three or four years older than Harry; but what of that? Papa Brooke might feel, in a vague British way, that it was somehow undignified for his son to marry a girl who had first come there in their employ. And this marriage was sudden. It took them aback. But they would not really have been satisfied unless Harry had married a millionairess with a title, and even then only if he had waited until he was thirty-five or forty before leaving home.

“So what could they say except, ‘God bless you’?

“Mama Brooke kept a stiff upper lip, with the tears running down her face. Towards his son Papa Brook became very bluff and hearty and man-to-man, as though Harry had suddenly grown up overnight. At intervals papa and mama would murmur to each other in hushed tones, ‘I’m sure it’ll be all right!”―as one might speculate, at a funeral, about the destination of the deceased’s soul.

“But please to note: both parents were now enjoying themselves very much. Once used to the idea, they began to take pleasure in it. That is the way of families everywhere, and the Brookes were nothing if not conventional. Papa Brooke was looking forward to his son working harder in the leather business, building up an even sounder name for Pelletier et Cie. After all, the newly wedded pair would live at home or at least reasonably close to home. It was ideal. It was lyrical. It was Arcadian.

“And then . . . Tragedy.

“Black tragedy, I tell you as unforeseen and as unnerving as a bolt of magic.”

Professor Rigaud paused.

He had been sitting forward with his thick elbows on the table, arms upraised, the forefinger of his right hand tapping impressively against the forefinger of his left hand each time he made a point, his head a little on one side. He was like a lecturer. His shining eyes, his bald head, even his rather comical patch of moustache, had a fervour of intensity.

“Hah!” he said.

Exhaling his breath noisily through the nostrils, he sat upright. The thick cane, propped against his leg, fell to the floor with a clatter. He picked it up and set it carefully against the table. Reaching into his inside pocket, he produced a folded sheaf of manuscript and a photograph about half cabinet size.

“This,” he announced, “is a photograph of Miss Fay Seton. It was done in colour, not crudely either, by my friend Coco Legrand. The manuscript is an account of this case, which I have specially written for the archives of the Murder Club. But look, please, at the photograph!”

He pushed it across the table cloth, brushing away crumbs as he did so.

A soft face, a disturbingly haunting face, looked out past the shoulder of the beholder. The yes were wide-spaced, the brows thin; the nose was short; the lips were full and rather sensual though this was contradicted by the grace and fastidiousness about the carriage of the head. Those lips just avoided the twitch of a smile at their outer corners. The weight of dark red hair, smooth as fleece, seemed almost too heavy for the slender neck.

It was not beautiful. Yet it troubled the mind. Something about the yes―was it irony, was it bitterness under the faraway expression?―at once challenged you and fled from you.

“Now tell me!” said Professor Rigaud, with the proud satisfaction of one who believes himself to be on sure ground. “Can you see anything wrong in that face?”

Chapter III

“Wrong?” echoed Barbara Morell.

Georges Antoine Rigaud seemed convulsed by some vast inner amusement.

“Exactly, exactly, exactly! Why do I designate her as so very dangerous a woman?”

Miss Morell had been following this narrative with the utmost absorption, and a faintly contemptuous expression. Once or twice she had glanced at Miles, as though about to speak. She watched Professor Rigaud as he picked up his dead cigar from the edge of a saucer, took a triumphant puff at it, and put it down again.

“I’m afraid,”―suddenly her voice went high, as though she were somehow personally concerned in this―I’m afraid we must get back to a matter of definition. How do you mean, dangerous? So attractive that she . . . Well, turned the head of every man she met?”

“No!” said Professor Rigaud with emphasis.

Again he chuckled.

“I admit, mark you,” he hastened to add, “that with many men this might well be the case. Look at the photograph there! But I was not what I meant.”

“Then in what way dangerous?” persisted Barbara Morell, a luster of intentness, even slight anger, coming into her grey yes. She shot out the next question as something like a challenge. “You mean―a criminal?”

“My dear young lady! No, no, no!”

“An adventuress, then?”

Barbara struck her hand against the edge of the table.

“A trouble-maker of some kind, is that it?” she cried. “Malicious? Or spiteful? Or tale-bearing?”

“I say to you,” declared Professor Rigaud, “that Fay Seton was none of those things. Forgive me if I, the old cynic, insist that in her puritanical way she was altogether gentle and goodhearted.”

“Then what’s left?”

“What is left, mademoiselle, is the real answer to the mystery. The mystery of the unpleasant rumours that began to creep through Chartres and the surrounding country. The mystery of why our sober, conservative Mr. Howard Brooke, her prospective father-in-law, cursed her aloud in a public place like the Credit Lyonnais Bank . . .”

Under her breath Barbara uttered a curious sound which was either incredulity or contempt, either disbelieving this or dismissing it as of no importance whatever. Professor Rigaud blinked at her.

“You doubt me, mademoiselle?”

“No! Of course not!” Her colour went up. “What do I about it?”

“And you, Mr. Hammond: you say little?”

“Yes,” Miles replied absently. “I was―

“Looking at the photograph?”

“Yes. Looking at the photograph.”

Professor Rigaud opened his eyes delightedly.

“You are impressed, eh?”

“There’s a kind of spell about it,” said Miles, brushing his hand across his forehead. “The eyes there in the picture! And the way she’s got her head turned. Confound the photograph!”

“He, Miles Hammond, was a tired man only recently recovered from a very long illness. He wanted peace. He wanted to live in seclusion in the New Forest, among old books, with his sister to keep house for him until her marriage. He didn’t want to have his imagination stirred. Yet he sat staring at the photograph, staring at it under the candlelight until its subtle colours grew blurred, while Professor Rigaud went on.

“These rumours about Fay Seton . . .”

“What rumours?” Barbara asked sharply.

Blandly, Professor Rigaud ignored this.

“For myself, blind bat and owl that I am, I had heard nothing of them. Harry Brooke and Fay Seton became engaged to be married in the middle of July. Now I must tell you about the twelfth of August.

“On that day, which seemed to me like any other day, I am writing a critical article for the Revue de Deux Mondes. morning I write in my pleasant hotel room, as I have been doing for nearly a week. But after lunch I step across the Place des Epars to get my hair cut. And while I am there, i think to myself, I will just go into the Credit Lyonnais and cash a cheque before the bank closes.

“It was very warm. All morning the sky had been heavy and dark, with fits of vague prowling thunder and sometimes spatters of rain. But nothing more than a drizzle; no cloudburst; nothing to let the heat out and give us peace. So I went into the Credit Lyonnais. And the first person I saw, coming out of the manager’s office, was Mr. Howard Brooke.

“Odd?

“Rather odd, yes! For I had imagined he would be at his office, like the conscientious fellow he was.

“Mr. Brooke regarded me very strangely. He wore a raincoat and a tweed cap. Over his left arm was hung the crook of a cane, and in his right hand he carried an old black-leather brief-case. It seemed to me even then that his light-blue eyes looked strangely watery; nor had I ever noticed before, in a man so fit, that there was sagging flesh under his chin.

“’My dear Brooke!’ I said to him, and shook hands with him in spite of himself. His hand felt very limp. ‘My dear Brooke,’ I said, ‘this is an unexpected pleasure! How is everyone at home? How is your good wife, and Harry, and Fay Seton?’

“’Fay Seton?’ he said to me. ‘Damn Fay Seton.’

“Ouf!

“He had spoken in English, but so loudly that one or two persons in the bank glanced round. He flushed with embarrassment, this good man, but he was so troubled that he did not really seem to care. He marched me to the front of the bank, beyond hearing of anyone else. Then he opened the brief-case, and showed me.

“Inside, in solitary state, were four slender packets of English banknotes. Each packet contained twenty-five twenty-pound notes: two thousand pounds.

“’I had to send to Paris for these,’ he told me, and his hands were trembling. ‘I thought, you know, that English notes would be more tempting. If Harry won’t give the woman up, I must simply buy her off. Now you must excuse me.’

“and he straightened his shoulders, shut up the brief-case, and walked out of the bank without another word.

“My friends, have you ever been hit very hard in the stomach? So that your eyesight swims, and your stomach rises up, and you feel suddenly like a rubber toy squeezed together? That was how I felt then. I forgot to write a cheque. I forgot everything. I walked back to my hotel, through a drizzling rain that was turning black and greasy the cobblestones of the Place des Epars.

“But it was impossible to write, as I discovered. About half an hour later, at a quarter past three, the telephone rang. I think I guessed what it might be about, though I did not guess what it was. It was Mama Brooke, Mrs. Georgina Brooke, and she said:

“’For God’s sake, Professor Rigaud, come out here immediately.’

“This time, my friends, I am more than disturbed.

“This time I am thoroughly well frightened, and I confess it!

“I got out my Ford; I drove out to their house as fast as I could, and with an even more execrable style of driving than usual. Still it would not rain properly, would not burst a hole in this hollow of thundery heat that enclosed us. When I reached Beauregard, it was like a deserted house. I called aloud in the downstairs hall, but nobody answered. Then I went into the drawing-room, where I found Mama Brooke sitting bolt upright on a sofa, making heroic efforts to keep her face from working, but with a damp handkerchief clutched in her hand.

“’Madame,’ I said to her, ‘what is happening? What is wrong between your good husband and Miss Seton?’

“And she cried out to me, having nobody else to whom she could appeal.

“’I don’t know!’ she said; it was plain she meant it. ‘Howard won’t tell me. Harry says it’s all nonsense, whatever it is, but he won’t tell me anything either. Nothing is real any longer. Only two days ago . . .’

“Only two days before, it appeared, there had been a shocking and unexplained incident.

“Near Beauregard, on the main road to Le Mans, lived a market-gardener named Jules Fresnac, who supplied them with eggs and fresh vegetables. Jules Fresnac had two children―a daughter of seventeen, a son of sixteen―to whom Fay Seton had been very kind, so that the whole Fresnac family was very fond of her. But two days ago Fay Seton had met Jules Fresnac driving his cart in the road, in the white road with the tall poplars and grain-fields on either side. Jules Fresnac got down from his cart, his face bluish and swollen with fury, and shouted and screamed at her until she put up a hand to cover her eyes.

“All this was witnessed by Mama Brooke’s maid, Alice. Alice was too far away to catch what was being said; the man’s voice, in any case, was so hoarse with rage as to be almost unrecognizable. But, as Fay Seton turned around to hurry away, Jules Fresnac picked up a stone and flung it at her.

“A pretty story, h?”

“This was what Mama Brooke told me, with helpless gestures of her hands, while she sat on the sofa in that drawing-room.

“’And now,’ she said, ‘Howard has gone out to that tower, to Henry the Fourth’s tower, to meet poor Fay. Professor Rigaud, you have go to help us. You have to do something.’

“’But, madame! What can do?”

“’I can’t tell you,’ she answered me; she might have once been pretty. ‘But something dreadful is going to happen! I know it!’

“Mr. Brooke, it developed, had returned from the bank at three o’clock with his brief-case full of money. He told his wife that he meant to have what he called a show-down with Fay Seton, and that he had arranged to meet her at the tower at four o’clock.

“He then asked Mama Brooke where Harry was, because he said he wanted Harry to be present at the show-down. She replied that Harry was upstairs in his room, writing a letter, so the father went upstairs to get him. He didn’t find Harry―who, actually, was tinkering with a motor in the garage―and presently he came downstairs again. ‘So pitiful looked,’ said Mama Brooke, ‘and so aged, and walking slowly as though he wee ill.’ That was how Papa Brooke went out of the house towards the tower.

“Not five minutes later, Harry himself turned up from the garage and asked where his father was. Mama Brooke told him, rather hysterically. Harry stood for a moment thinking to himself, murmuring, and then he went out of the house towards Henri Quatre’s tower. During this time there was no sign of Fay Seton.

“’Professor Rigaud,’ the mother cried to me, ‘you’ve got to follow them and do something. You’re the only friend we have here, and you’ve got to follow them!”

“A job, eh, for old Uncle Rigaud?”

“My word!

“And yet I followed them.

“There was a crack of thunder as I left the house, but still it would not rain in earnest. I walked northwards along the east bank of the river, until I came to the stone bridge. There I crossed the bridge to the west bank. The tower stood on that side, overhanging the bank a little farther up.

“It looks desolate enough, I tell you, when you stumble across the few old bits of blackened stone―fire-razed, overgrown in earth with weeds―which are all that remained of the original building. The entrance to the tower is only a rounded arch cut in the wall. This doorway faces west, away from the river, towards open grass and a wood of chestnut trees beyond. I approached there with the sky darkening, and the wind blowing still harder.

“In the doorway, looking at me, stood Fay Seton.

“Fay Seton, in a thin flowered-silk frock, stocking less, with white openwork leather sandals. She carried over her arm a bathing-dress, a towel, and a bathing-cap; but she had not been in to swim, since not even the edges of the shining dark-red hair were damp or tumbled. She breathed slowly and heavily.

“’Mademoiselle,’ I said to her, not at all certain what I was supposed to do, ‘I am looking for Harry Brooke and his father.’

“For some five seconds, which can seem a very long time, she did not answer.

“’They’re here,’ she told me. ‘Upstairs. On the roof of the tower.’ All of a sudden her eyes (I swear it!) wee the eyes of one who remembers a horrible experience of some kind. ‘They seem to be having an argument. I don’t think I shall intrude just now. Excuse me.’

“’But, mademoiselle!―

“’Please excuse me!’

“Then she was gone, keeping her face turned away from me. One or two raindrops stung the wind-blown grass, followed by others.

“I put my head inside the doorway. As I told you, that tower was no more than a stone shell, up whose wall a spiraling stone staircase climbed to a square opening giving on the flat roof. It smelt inside of age and the river. It was empty, as bare as your and, except for a couple of wooden benches and a broken chair. Long narrow windows along the staircase lighted it fairly well, though there was a wild enough stormlight flying over the sky now.

“Angry voice were speaking up there. I could hear them faintly. I gave them a shout, my voice making a hollow echo in that stone jug, and the voices stopped instantly.

“So I plodded up the corkscrew stair―a dizzy business, also very bad for one scan of breath―and emerged through the square opening on the roof.

“Harry Brooke and his father stood facing each other on a circular stone platform, with a high parapet, well above the trees. The father, in his raincoat and tweed cap, had his mouth set implacably. The son pleaded with him; Harry was hatless and coatless, in a corduroy suit whose windblown tie emphasized his state of mind. Both of them were pale and worked up, but both seemed rather relieved it was I who had interrupted them.

“’I tell you, sir―!’ Harry was beginning.

“’For the last time,’ said Mr. Brooke in a cold buttoned-up voice, ‘will you allow me to deal with this matter in my own way?’ He turned to me and added: ‘Professor Rigaud!’

“’Yes, my dear fellow?’

“’Will you take my son away from here until I have adjusted certain matters to my own satisfaction?’

“’Take him where, my dear fellow?’

“’Take him anywhere,’ replied Mr. Brooke, and turned his back on us.

“It was now, as I saw by a surreptitious glance at my watch, ten minutes to four o-clock. Mr. Brooke was due to meet Fay Seton there at four o’clock, and he meant to wait. Harry was beaten and deflated; that leapt to the eyes. I said nothing about having met Miss Fay a moment before, since I wanted to pour ointment on the situation instead of inflaming it. Harry allowed me to lead him away.

“Now I wish to impress on you―very clearly!―the last thing we saw as we went downstairs.

“Mr. Brook was standing by the parapet, his back uncompromisingly turned. On one side of him his cane, of light yellowish-colored wood, was propped upright against the parapet. On the other side of him, also resting against the parapet, was the bulging brief-case. Round the tower-top this battlemented parapet ran breast-high; its stone broken, crumbling, and scored with whitish hieroglyphics where people had cut their initials.

“That is clear? Good!

“I took Harry downstairs. I led him across the open space of grass, into the shelter of the big wood of chestnut trees stretching westwards and northwards. For the rain was beginning to sprinkle pretty heavily now, and we had no cover. Under the hissing and pattering leaves, where it was almost dark, my curiosity reached a point of mania. I begged Harry, as his friend and in a sense his tutor, to tell me the meaning of these suggestions against Fay Seton.

“At first he would hardly listen to me. He kept opening and shutting his hands, this handsome mentally unformed young man, and replied that it was all too ridiculous to be talked about.

“’Harry,’ said Uncle Rigaud, lifting an impressive forefinger like this. ‘Harry, I have spoken to you much of French literature. I have spoken to you of crime and the occult. I have covered a broad field of human experience. And I tell you that the things which cause the most trouble in this world are the things which are too ridiculous to talk about.’

“He regarded me quickly, with a strange, sullen, shining eye.

“’Have you,’ he asked, ‘have you heard about Jules Fresnac, the market gardener?’

“’Your mother mentioned him,’ I said, ‘but I have yet to hear what is wrong with Jules Fresnac.’

“’Jules Fresnac,’ said Harry, ‘has a son aged sixteen.’

“’Well?’

“That was the point where―in the twilight woods, out of sight of the tower―we heard a child screaming.

“Yes: a child screaming.

“I tell you,it scared me until I felt my scalp crawl. A drop of rain filtered through the thick leaves overhead, and landed on my bald head, and I jumped throughout every muscle in my body. For I had been congratulating myself that trouble was averted: that Howard Brooke and Harry Brooke and Fay Seton were for the moment separated, and that these three elements were not dangerous unless they came together all at once. And now . . .

“The screaming came from the direction of the tower. Harry and I ran out of the woods, and emerged into the open grassy space with the tower and the curve of the riverbank in front of us. That whole open space now seemed to be full o people.

“What had happened we learned soon enough.

“Inside the fringe of the wood there had been, for some half an hour, a picnic-party composed of a Monsieur and Madame Lambert, their niece, their daughter-in-law, and four younger children aged from nine to fourteen.

“Like true French picnickers, they had refused to let the weather put them off an appointed day. The land was private, of course. But private property means less in France than it does in England. Knowing that Mr. Brooke was supposed o be crotchety about trespassers, they had hung back until they had seen the departure first of Fay Seton and then of Harry and myself. They would assume the coast was clear. The children erupted into the open space, while Monsieur and Madame Lambert sat them down against a chestnut-tree to open the picnic-basket.

“It was the two youngest children who went to explore the tower. As Harry and I rushed out of the wood, I can see yet that little girl standing in the doorway of the tower, pointing upwards. I hear her voice, shrill and raw.

“’Papa! Papa! Papa! There’s a man up there all covered with blood!”

“That was what she said.

“Myself, I cannot say what the others said or did at that moment. Yet I remember the children turning faces of consternation towards their parents, and a blue-and-white rubber ball rolling across the grass to splash into the river. I walked towards that tower, not quite running. I climbed the spiral stair. A strange, wild, fanciful thought occurred to me as I went: that it was very inconsiderate to ask Miss Fay Seton, with her weak heart, to climb up all these steps.

“Then got out on to the roof, where the wind blew freshly.

“Mr. Howard Brooke―still alive, still twitching―lay flat on his face in the middle. The back of his raincoat was soaked and sodden with blood, showing a half-inch rent where he had been stabbed through the back just under the left shoulder-blade.

“I have not yet mentioned that his own cane, the cane he always carried, was really a sword-stick. It now lay in two halves on either side of him. The handle-part, with its long thin pointed blade stained with blood, was lying near his right foot. The wooden sheath had rolled away to rest against the inside of the parapet opposite. But the briefcase containing two thousand pounds had disappeared.

“All this I saw in a kind of daze, while the family of Lambert screamed below. The time was exactly six minutes past four o’clock: I noted this not from any police sense, but because I wondered whether Fay Seton had kept her appointment.

“I ran over to Mr. Brooke, and raised him up to a sitting position. He smiled at me and tried to speak, but all he could get out was, ‘Bad show.’ Harry joined me among the smears of blood, though Harry was not much help. He said, ‘Dad, who did this?’ but the old man was past articulation. He died in his son’s arms a few minutes later, clinging to Harry as though he himself were the child.”

Here Professor Rigaud paused in his narrative.

Looking rather guilty, he lowered his head and glowered down at the dinner-table, his thick hands spread out on either side of it. There was along silence until he shook himself, impatiently.

With extraordinary intensity he added:

“Remark well, please, what I tell you now!

“We know that Mr. Howard Brooke was unhurt, in the best of health, when I left him alone on top of the tower at ten minutes to four o’clock.

“Following that, the person who murdered him must have visited him on top of the tower. This person, when his back was turned, must have drawn the sword-cane from its sheath and run him through the body. Indeed, the police discovered that several fragments of crumbling rock had been detached from one of the broken battlements on the river-side, as though someone’s fingers had torn them loose in climbing up there. And this must have occurred between ten minutes to four and five minutes past four, when the two children discovered him in a dying condition.

“Good! Excellent! Established!”

Professor Rigaud hitched his chair forward.

“yet the evidence shows conclusively,” he said, “that during this time not a living soul came near him.”

Chapter IV

You hear what I say?” insisted Rigaud, snapping his fingers rapidly in the air to attract attention.

Whereupon Miles Hammond woke up.

To any person of imagination, he thought, this narrative of the stout little professor―its sounds and scents and rounded visual detail―had the reality of the living present. Momentarily Miles forgot that he was sitting in an upper room at Beltring’s Restaurant, beside candles burning low and windows opening on Romilly Street. Momentarily he lived the sounds and scents and visual outlines in that story, so that the whisper of the rain in Romilly Street became the rain over Henri Quatre’s tower.

He found himself emotionally stirred up, worrying and fretting and taking sides. He liked this Mr. Howard Brooke, liked him and respected him and sympathized with him, as though the man had been a personal friend. Whoever had killed the old boy . . .

And all this time, even more disturbingly, the enigmatic eyes of Fay Seton were looking back at him from the tinted photograph now lying on the table.

“I beg you pardon,” said Miles, rousing himself with a start at the snapping of Professor Rigaud’s fingers. “Er―would you mind repeating that last sentence?”

Professor Rigaud uttered his sardonic chuckle.

“With pleasure,” he replied politely. “I said that the evidence showed not a living soul had come near Mr. Brooke during those fatal fifteen minutes.”

“Had come near him?”

“Or could have come near him. He was utterly alone on top of the tower.”

Miles sat up straight.

“Let’s get this clear!” he said. “The man was stabbed?”

“He was stabbed,” assented Professor Rigaud. “I am in the proud position of being able to show you, now, the weapon with which the crime was committed.”

With modest deprecation he reached out to touch the thick cane, of light yellowish wood, which throughout the dinner had never left his side and which was now propped against the edge of the table.

“That,” cried Barbara Morell, “is―?”

“Yes. This belonged to Mr. Brook. I think I intimated to mademoiselle that I am a collector of such relics. It is a beauty, eh?”

With a dramatic gesture, picking up the cane in both hands, Professor Rigaud unscrewed the curved handle. He drew out the long, thin, pointed steel blade, wickedly caught by candlelight and he laid it with some reverence on the table. Yet the blade had little life or gleam; it had not been cleaned or polished in some years; and Miles could see, as it lay there across the edge of Fay Seton’s photograph, the darkish rust-colored stains that had dried along it.

“A beauty, eh?” Professor Rigaud repeated. “There are also blood-stains inside the scabbard, if you care to hold it up to the eye.”

Abruptly Barbara Morell pushed back her chair, got to her feet, and backed away.

“Why on earth,” she cried, “must you bring such things here? And positively gloat over them?”

The good professor’s eyebrows went up in astonishment.

“Mademoiselle does not like it?”

“No. Please put it way. It’s―it’s ghoulish!”

“But mademoiselle must like such things, surely? Or else she would not be a guest of the Murder Club?”

“Yes. Yes, of course!” she corrected herself hastily. “Only . . .”

“Only what?” prompted Professor Rigaud in a soft, interested voice.

Miles, himself wondering not a little, watched her as she stood grasping the back of the chair.

Once or twice he had been conscious of her eyes fixed on him across the table. But for the most part she had looked steadily at Professor Rigaud. She must have been smoking cigarettes furiously throughout the narrative: for the first time Miles noticed at least half a dozen stubs in the saucer of her coffee-cup. At one point, during the description of Jules Fresnac’s tirade against Fay Seton, she had bent down as though to pick up something from under the table.

A vital, not-very-tall figure―it may have been the white gown which gave her such a small-girl appearance―Barbara stood moving and twisting her fingers on the back of the chair.

“Yes, yes, yes?” went on the probing voice of professor Rigaud. “You are very much interested in such things. Only . . .”

Barbara forced out a laugh.

“Well!” she said. “It doesn’t do to make crimes too . Any fiction-writer can tell you that.”

“Are you a writer of fiction, mademoiselle?”

“Not―exactly.” She laughed again, trying to dismiss the subject with a turn of her wrist. “Anyway,” she hurried on, “you tell us somebody murdered this Mr. Brooke. Who murdered him? Was it―Fay Seton?”

There was a pause, a pause of slightly tense nerves, before Professor Rigaud eyed her as though trying to make up his mind. Then he chuckled.

“What assurance will you have, mademoiselle? Have I not told you that this lady was not, in the accepted sense, a criminal of any kind?”

“Oh!” said Barbara Morell. “Then that's all right.”

And she drew back her chair and sat down again, while Miles stared at her.

“if you think it’s all right, Miss Morell, I can’t say I agree. According to Professor Rigaud here, nobody went near the victim at any time―

“Exactly! And I repeat the statement!”

“How can you be sure of it?”

“Among other things, witnesses.”

“Such as?”

With a quick glance at Barbara, Professor Rigaud tenderly picked up the blade-part of the sword-stick. He replace it in the cane-scabbard, screwed its threads tight again, and once more propped it up with nicety against the side of the table.

“You will perhaps agree, my friend, that I am an observant man?”

Miles grinned. “I agree without a struggle.”

“Good! Then I will show you.”

Professor Rigaud illustrated the next part of his argument by again sticking his elbows on the table, lifting his arms, tapping the forefinger of his right hand against the forefinger of his left, an at the same time bringing his intent, gleaming eyes so close to the fingers that he almost grew cross-eyed.

“First of all, I myself can testify that there was no person in or on the tower―hiding there―when we left Mr. Brooke alone. Such an idea is absurd! The place was as bare as a jug! I saw for myself! And the same truth applies to my return at five minutes past four, when I can take my oath that no murderer was lurking inside to make subsequent escape.

“Next, what happens as soon as Harry and I go away? The open grass space, surrounding the tower on every side except for the narrow segment where it overhangs the river, is instantly invaded by a family of eight persons: Monsieur and Madame Lambert, their niece, their daughter-in-law, and four children.

“I am a bachelor, thank God.

“These people take possession of the open space. By sheer numbers they fill t. Papa and Mama are in sight of the doorway. Niece and eldest child keep walking around the tower looking at it. The two youngest are actually inside. And all agree that no person either entered or left the tower during that time.”

Miles opened his mouth to make a protest, but Professor Rigaud intervened before he could speak.

“It is true,” the professor conceded, “that these people could not speak as to the side of the round-tower facing the river.”

“Ah!” said Miles. “There were no witnesses on that side?”

“Alas, none.”

“Then it’s fairly obvious, isn’t it? You told us a while ago that one of the battlements round the parapet, on the side facing the river, had crumbling pieces of rock broken off as though someone’s fingers had clawed at them in climbing up. The murderer must have come from the river-side.”

“Consider,” said Professor Rigaud in a persuasive voice, “the difficulties of such a theory.”

“What difficulties?”

The other checked them off on his forefinger, tapping again.

“No boat approached the tower, or it would have been seen. The stone of that tower, forty feet high, was as smooth as a wet fish. The lowest window (as measured by the police) was full twenty-five feet above the surface of the water. How does your murderer scale the wall, kill Mr. Brooke, and get down again?”

There was a long silence.

“But, hang it all, the thing was done!” protested Miles. “You’re not going to tell me this crime was committed by a . . .”

“By a what?”

The question was fired back so quickly, while Professor Rigaud lowered his hands and leaned forward, that Miles felt an eerie and disturbing twinge of nerves. It seemed to him that Professor Rigaud was trying to tell him something, trying to lead him, trying to draw him on, with sardonic amusement behind it.

“I was going to say,” Miles answered, “by some sort of supernatural being that could float in the air.”

“How curious for you to use those words! How very interesting!”

“Would you mind if I interrupted for a moment?” asked Barbara, fiddling with the table cloth. “The main thing, after all, is about―is about Fay Seton. Think you said she had an appointment with Mr. Brooke for four o’clock. Did she keep that appointment at all?”

“She was, at least, not seen.”

“Did keep that appointment, Professor Rigaud?”

“She arrived there afterwards, mademoiselle. When it was all over.”

“Then what was she doing during that time?”

“Ah!” said Professor Rigaud, with such relish that both his auditors half dreaded what he might say. “Now we come to it!”

“Come to what?”

“The most fascinating part of the mystery. This puzzle of a man alone when he is stabbed”―Professor Rigaud puffed out his cheeks―it is interesting, yes. But to me the great interest of a case is not in material clues, like a bright little puzzle-box with all the pieces numbered and of a different colour. No! To me it lies in the human mind, the human behaviour: if you like, the human soul.” His voice sharpened. “Fay Seton, for example. Describe for me, if you can, her mind and soul.”

“It might help us,” Miles pointed out, “if we learned what she had been doing which upset people so much, and changed everybody’s feelings towards her. Forgive me, but―you do know what it was?”

“Yes.” The word was clipped off. “I know.”

“And where she was at the time of the murder,” continued Miles, with questions boiling inside him. “And what the police thought about her position in the affair. And what happened to her romance with Harry Brooke. And, in short, the whole end of the story!”

Professor Rigaud nodded.

“I will tell you,” he promised. “But first”―like a good connoisseur, tantalizingly, he beamed as he held them in suspense―we must have a glass of something to drink. My throat is as dry as sand. And you must drink too.” He raised his voice. “Waiter!”

After a pause he shouted again. The sound filled the room; it seemed to draw vibrations from the engraving of the skull hung over the mantelpiece, it made the candle-flames curl slowly; but there was no reply. Outside the windows the night was now pitch-black, gurgling as though from a waterspout.

“Ah, zut!” fussed Professor Rigaud, and began to look about for a bell.

“To tell you the truth,” ventured Barbara, “I’m rather surprised we haven’t been turned out of here long ago. The Murder Club seem to be very favored people. It must be nearly eleven o’clock.”

“It is nearly eleven o’clock,” fumed Professor Rigaud, consulting his watch. Then he bounced to his feet, “I beg of you, mademoiselle, that you will not disturb yourself! Or you, either, my friend: I will get the waiter.”

The double-doors to the outer room closed behind him again whisking the candle-flames. As Miles got up automatically to anticipate him. Barbara stretched out her hand and touched his arm. Her eyes, those friendly sympathetic grey eyes under the smooth forehead and the wings of ash-blonde hair, said silently but very clearly that she wanted to ask him a question in private.

Miles sat down again.

“Yes, Miss Morell?”

She withdrew her hand quickly. “I … I don't know how to begin, really.”

“Then suppose I begin?” said Miles, with that tolerant and crooked smiled which so much inspired confidence.

“How do you mean?”

“I don't want to pry into anything, Miss Morell. This is entirely between ourselves. But it has struck me, once or twice tonight, that you're far more interested in the specific case of Fay Seton than you are in the Murder Club.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Isn't it true? Professor Rigaud's noticed it too.”

“Yes. It's true.” She spoke after a hesitation, nodding vigorously and then turning her head away. “That's why I owe you an explanation. And I want to give you an explanation. But before I do”―she turned back to face him―may I ask you a horribly impertinent question? I 't want to pry either; really I don't; but may I ask?”

“Of course. What do you want to know?”

Barbara tapped the photograph of Fay Seton, lying between them beside the folded sheaf of manuscript.

“You're fascinated by that, aren't you?” she asked.

“Well―yes. I suppose I am.”

“You wonder,” said Barbara, “what it would be like to be in love with her.”

If her first remark had been a trifle disconcerting, the second took him completely aback.

“Are you setting up as a mind-reader, Miss Morell?”

“I'm sorry! But isn't it true?”

“No! Wait! Hold on! That's going a bit too far!”

the photograph had been having a hypnotic effect, he could not in honesty deny it. But that was curiosity, the lure of a puzzle. Miles had always been rather amused by those stories, usually romantic stories with a tragic ending, in which some poor devil falls in love with a woman's picture. Such things had actually happened in real life, of course; but it failed to lessen his disbelief. And, in any case, the question didn't arise here.

He could have laughed at Barbara for her seriousness.

“Anyway,” he countered, “why do you ask that?”

“Because of something you said earlier this evening. Please don't try to remember what it was!” Humour, a wryness about the mouth to contradict the smile in her eyes, showed in Barbara's face. “I'm probably only tired, and imagining things. Forget I said it! Only ...”

“You see, Miss Morell, I'm a historian.”

“Oh?” Her manner was quickly sympathetic.

Miles felt rather sheepish. “That's a highfalutin way of putting it, I'm afraid. But it does happen to be true, in however small a way. My work, the world I live in, is made up of people I never knew. Trying to visualize, trying to understand, a lot of men and women who were only heaps of dust before I was born. As for this Fay Seton ...”

“She is wonderfully attractive, isn't she?” Barbara indicated the photograph.

“Is she?” Miles said coolly. “It's not a bad piece of work, certainly. Coloured photographs are usually an abomination. Anyway,” fiercely he groped back to the subject, “this woman is no more real than Agnes Sorel or―or Pamela Hoyt. We don't know anything about her.” He paused, startled. “Come to think of it, we haven't even heard whether she's still alive.”

“No,” the girl agreed slowly. “No, we haven't even heard that.”

Barbara got up slowly, brushing her knuckles across the table as though throwing something away. She drew a deep breath.

“I can only ask you again,” she said, “please to forget everything I've just said. It was only a silly idea of mine; it couldn't possibly come to anything. What a queer evening this has been! Professor Rigaud does rather cast a spell, doesn't he? And, as far as that's concerned” – she spoke suddenly, twitching her head round – ”isn't Professor Rigaud being a long time in finding a waiter?”

“Professor Rigaud!” called Miles. He lifted up his voice powerfully, “Professor Rigaud!”

Again, as when the absent one had himself called for a waiter, only the rain gurgled and splashed in the darkness. There was no reply.

Chapter V

Miles rose to his feet and went over to the double-doors.

He threw them open, and looked in an outer room sombre and deserted. Bottles and glasses had been removed from the improvised bar; only one electric light was burning.

“A queer evening,” Miles declared, “is absolutely right. First the whole Murder Club disappears. Professor Rigaud tells us an incredible story,” Miles shook his head as though to clear it, “which grows even more incredible when you have time to think. The he disappears Common sense suggests he's only gone to – never mind. But at the same time ...”

The mahogany door to the hall opened. Frederic, the head-waiter, his round-jawed face aloof with reproach, slipped in.

“Professor Rigaud, sir,” he announced, “is downstairs. At the telephone.”

Barbara, who had stopped only long enough, apparently, to pick up her handbag and blow out one candle which was fluttering and flaring in a harsh gush of wax-smoke, had followed Miles into the outer room. Again she stopped short.

“At the telephone?” Barbara repeated.

“Yes, miss.”

“But” – the words sounded almost comic as she flung them out – “he was looking for someone to serve us drinks!”

“Yes, miss. The call came through while he was downstairs.”

“From whom?”

“I believe, miss, from Dr. Gideon Fell.” Slight pause. “The Honorary Secretary of the Murder Club.” Slight pause. “Dr. Fell learned Professor Rigaud had been ringing up from here earlier in the evening; so Dr. Fell rang back.” Was there a dangerous quality, now, about Frederic's eye? “Professor Rigaud seems very angry, miss.”

“Oh, good Lord!” breathed Barbara in a voice of honest consternation.

Over the back of one of the pink brocaded chairs, chairs ranged as stiffly round the room as in an undertaker's parlour, hung the girl's fur wrap and an umbrella. Assuming an air of elaborate unconcern which would have deceived nobody, Barbara picked them up and twisted the wrap round her shoulders.

“I'm awfully sorry,” she said to Miles. “I shall have to go now.”

He stared at her.

“But, look here! You can't go now! Won't the old boy be annoyed if he comes back and finds you're not here?”

“No half as annoyed,” Barbara said with conviction, “as if he comes back and finds I am here.” She fumbled at her handbag. “– I want to pay for my share of the dinner. It's been very nice. I–“ Confusion, utter and complete, overcame her down to the finger-tips. Her handbag overflowed, spilling coins and keys and a compact on the floor.

Miles restrained an impulse to laugh, though certainly not at her. A great dazzle of illumination came into his mind. He bent down, picked up the fallen articles, dropped them into her handbag, and closed it with a snap.

“You arranged all this, didn't you?” he asked her.

“Arranged? I ...”

“You dished the meeting of the Murder Club, by God! In some way you put off Dr. Fell and Mr. Justice Coleman and Dam Ellen Nye and Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all! All except Professor Rigaud, because you wanted to hear his first-hand account about Fay Seton! But you knew the Murder Club had never entertained any guests except the speaker, so you hadn't bargained on my turning up ...”

Her dead-serious voice recalled him.

“Please! Don't make a fool of me!”

Wrenching loose from the hand he had put on her arm, Barbara ran for the door. Frederic, a stony eye on one corner of the ceiling, slowly moved aside for her as one who calls attention to the fact that he could have sent for the police. Miles hurried after her.

“Here! Wait! I wasn't blaming you! I ...”

But she was already flying down the soft-carpeted hall, in the direction of the private stair to Greek Street.

Miles glanced round desperately. Opposite him was the illuminated sign of the gentleman's cloakroom. He snatched up his raincoat, crammed his hat on his head, and returned to face the speaking eye of Frederic.

“Are the dinners of the Murder Club paid for by somebody in a lump sum? Or does each person pay for his own?”

“It is the rule for each person to pay for his own, sir. But tonight–“

“I know, I know!” Miles thrust banknotes into the man's hand, with pleasurable exhilaration at the thought that he could nowadays afford to do so. “This is to cove everything. Present my distinguished compliments to Professor Rigaud, and say I'll ring him in the morning to apologize. Don't know where he's staying in London,” this was an impasse he swept aside, “but I can find out. Er – have I given you enough money?”

“More than enough money, sir. At the same time ...”

“Sorry. My fault. Good night!”

He dared not run to hard, since his old illness was apt to claw at him and make his head swim. But his pace was tolerably fast all the same. As he got downstairs and outside, he could just see the glimmer of Barbara's white dress, under the short fur wrap, moving in the direction of Frith Street. Then he really did run.

A taxi rolled down Frith Street in the direction of Shaftesbury Avenue, its motor whirring with great distinctness in the hollow-punctuated silence of London at night. Miles shouted at I without much hope, but to his surprise it hesitatingly swerved in towards the kerb. With his left hand Miles caught at Barbara Morell's arm; with his right he twisted open the handle of the cab door before someone else should appear, ghostly out of the rain-pattering gloom, to lay claim to it.

“Honestly,” he said to Barbara, with such a warmth of sincerity that her arm relaxed, “there was no reason to run away like that. You can at least let me drop you off at home. Where do you live?”

“St. John's Wood. But ...”

“Can't do it, governor,” said the taxi-driver in a fierce voice of defiance mingled with martyrdom. “I'm going Victoria way, and I've only just enough petrol to get home.”

“All right. Drop us at Piccadilly Circus tube-station.”

The car door slammed. There was a slur of tyres on wet asphalt. Barbara in the far corner of the seat, spoke in a small voice.

“You'd like to kill me, wouldn't you?” she asked.

“For the last time, my dear girl: no! On the contrary. Life has been made so uncomfortable for us that every little bit helps.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“A high-court judge, a barrister-politician, and a number of other important people have been carefully flummoxed at something they'd arranged. Wouldn't it delight your heart if you heard―as you never will―of an Important Person who couldn't make a reservation or got thrown back to the tail-end of a queue?”

The girl looked at him.

“You are nice,” she said seriously.

This threw Miles a little off balance.

“It isn't a question of what you call niceness,” he retorted with some violence. “It's a question of Old Adam.”

“But poor Professor Rigaud―

“Yes, it's a bit rough on Rigaud. We must find a way to make amends. All the same! – I don't know why you did t, Miss Morell, but I'm very glad you did it. Except for two reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“In the first place, I think you should have confided in Dr. Fell. He's a grand old boy; he'd have sympathized with anything you told him. And how he would have enjoyed that case of the man, murdered while alone on a tower. That is,” Miles added, with the perplexity and strangeness of the night wrapping him round, “if it was a real case and not a dream or a leg-pull. If you'd told Dr. Fell ...”

“But I don't even know Dr. Fell! I lied about that too.”

“It doesn't matter!”

“It does matter,” said Barbara, and pressed her hands hard over her eyes. “I'd never met any of the members. But I was in a position, you see, to learn all their names and addresses, and that Professor Rigaud was speaking on the Brooke case. I phoned everybody except Dr. Fell as Dr. Fell's private secretary, and said the dinner had been postponed. Then I got in touch with Dr. Fell as representing the President. And hoped to heaven both those two would be away from home tonight if someone did ring up for confirmation.”

she paused, staring straight ahead at the glass partition behind the driver's seat, and added slowly:

“I didn't do it for a joke.”

“No. I guessed that.”

“Did you?” cried Barbara. “Did you?”

The cab jolted. Motor-car lamps, odd in newness, once or twice swept the back of the cab with their brief unaccustomed glare through dingy rain-misted windows.

Barbara turned towards him. She put out a hand to steady herself against the glass partition in front. Anxiety, apology, a curious embarrassment, and―yes! Her obvious liking for him―shone in her expression as palpably as her wish to tell him something else. But she did not speak that something else. She only said:

“was the other reason?”

“Other reasons?”

“You told me there were two reasons why you regretted this―this foolishness of mine tonight. What's the other one?”

“Well!” He tried to sound light and casual. “Hang it all, I was a good deal interested in that case of the murder on the tower. Since Professor Rigaud probably isn't on speaking terms with either of us―

“You may never hear the end of the story. Is that t?”

“Yes that's it.”

“I see.” She was silent for a moment, tapping her fingers on the handbag, her mouth moving in an odd way and her eyes shining almost as though there were tears in the. “Where are you staying in town?”

“At the Berkeley. But I'm going back to the New Forest tomorrow. My sister and her fiance are coming up for the day, and we're all travelling back together.” Miles broke off. “Why do you ask?”

“Maybe I can help you.” Opening her handbag, she drew out a folded sheaf of manuscript and handed it to him. “This is Professor Rigaud's own account of the Brooke case, specially written for the archives of the Murder Club. I―I stole it from the table at Beltring's when you went to look for him. I was going to post it on to you when I'd finished reading, but I've already learned the only thing I really wanted to know.”

Insistently she thrust the manuscript back into his hands.

“I don't see how I can be of any use now,” she dried. “I don't see how can be of any use now!”

With a grind of gears into neutral, with the whush of tyres erratically scraping a kerb, the taxi drew up. Ahead loomed the cavern of Piccadilly Circus from the mouth of Shaftesbury Avenue, murmurous and shuffling with a late crowd. Instantly Barbara was across the cab and outside on the pavement.

“Don't get out!” she insisted, backing away. “I can go straight home in the Underground from here. And the taxi's going your way in any case.―Berkeley Hotel!” she called to the driver.

The door slammed just before eight American G.I.'s in three different parties, bore down simultaneously on the cab. Against the gleam of a lighted window Miles caught a glimpse of Barbara's face, smiling brightly and tensely and unconvincingly in the crowd as the taxi moved away.

Miles sat back, holding Professor Rigaud's manuscript and feeling it figuratively burn his hand.

Old Rigaud would be furious. He would demand to know, in a frenzy of Gallic logic, why this trick had been played on him. And that was not funny; that was only just and reasonable; for Miles himself had still no notion why. All of which he could be certain was that Barbara Morell's motive had been a strong one, passionately sincere.

As for Barbara's remark about Fay Seton …

“You wonder what it would be like to be in love with her.”

What infernal nonsense!

Had mystery of Howard Brooke's death ever been solved, by the police or by Rigaud or by anyone else? Had they learned who committed the murder, and how it was done? Evidently not, from the tenor of the professor's remarks. He had said h knew what was “wrong” with Fay Seton. But he had also said―though in queer, elusive terms―that he did not believe she was guilty. Every statement concerning the murder, through all that tortuous story, rang the clear indication that there had been no solution.

Therefore all this manuscript could tell him .. Miles glanced at it in the semi-darkness … would be the routine facts of the police investigation. It might tell him some sordid facts about the character of a pleasant-faced woman with red hair and blue eyes. But no more.

In an utter revulsion of feeling Miles hated the whole thing. He wanted peace and quiet. He wanted to be free from these clinging strands. With a sudden impulse, before he should think better of it, he leaned forward and tapped the glass panel.

“Driver! Have you got enough petrol to take me back to Beltring's Restaurant, and then on to the Berkeley?―Double fare if you do!”

The silhouette of the driver's back contorted with angry indecision; but the cab slowed down, slurred, and circled Eros's island back into Shaftesbury Avenue.

Miles was inspired by his new resolution. After all, he had been gone from Beltring's only a comparatively few minutes. What he proposed doing now was the only sensible thing to do. His resolution blazed brightly inside him when he jumped out of the taxi in Romilly Street, hurried round the corner to the side entrance, and up the stairs.

In the upstairs hall he found a dispirited-looking waiter occupied with the business of closing up.

“Is Professor Rigaud still her? A short stoutish French gentleman with a patch of moustache something like Hitler's, carrying a yellow cane?”

The waiter looked at him curiously.

“He is downstairs in the bar, monsieur. He ...”

“Give him this, will you?” requested Miles, and put the still-folded manuscript into the waiter's hand. “Tell him it was taken by mistake. Thank you.”

And he strode out again.

On the way home, lighting his pipe and inhaling the soothing smoke, Miles was conscious of a sensation of exhilaration and buoyancy. Tomorrow afternoon, when he had attended to the real business which brought him to London, he would meet Marion and Steve at the station. He would return to the country, to the secluded house in the New Forest where they had been established for only a fortnight, as a man plunges into cool water on a hot day.

That was disposed of, cut off at the root, before it could really trouble his mind. Whatever secret appertained to a phantom image called Fay Seton, it was no concern of his.

To claim his attention there would be his uncle's library, that alluring place hardly as yet explored during the confusion of moving in and settling down. By this time tomorrow night he would be at Greywood, among the ancient oaks and beeches of the New Forest, beside the little stream where rainbow trout rose at dusk when you flicked bits of bread on the water. Miles felt, in some extraordinary way, that he had got out of a snare.

His taxi dropped him at the Piccadilly entrance to the Berkeley: he paid the driver in an expansive mood. Seeing that the lounge inside was still pretty well filled at its little round tables, Miles, with his passionate hatred of crowds, deliberately walked round to the Berkeley Street entrance so that he might breathe solitude a little longer. The rain way clearing away. A freshness tinged the air. Miles pushed through the revolving doors into the little foyer, with the reception desk on his right.

He got his key at the desk, and stood debating the advisability of a final pipe and whisky-and-soda before turning in, when the night reception clerk hurried out of the cubicle with a slip of paper in his hand.

“Mr. Hammond!”

“Yes?”

The clerk scrutinized the slip of paper, trying to read his own handwriting.

“There's a message for you, sir. I think you applied to the―to this employment agency for a librarian to do cataloguing work?”

“I did,” said Miles. “And they promised to send an applicant round this evening. The applicant didn't turn up, which made me very late for a dinner I was attending.”

“The applicant did turn up, sir, eventually. The lady says she's very sorry, but it was unavoidable. She says things are very difficult, since she's only just been repatriated from France...”

“Repatriated from France?”

“Yes, sir.”

The hands of the gilt clock on the grey-green wall pointed to twenty-five minutes past eleven. Miles Hammond stood very still, and stopped twirling the key in his hand.

“Did the lady leave her name?”

“Yes, sir. Miss Fay Seton.”

Chapter VI

On the following afternoon, Saturday, the second of June, Miles reached Waterloo Station at four o'clock.

Waterloo, its curving acre of iron-girdered roof still darkened over except where a few patches of glass remained after the shake of bombs, had got over most of the Saturday rush to Bournemouth. But it still rang with a woman's spirited voice over a loud-speaker, telling people what queues to join. (If this voice ever begins to say something you want to hear, it is instantly drowned out by a hiss of steam or the thudding chest-notes of an engine.) Streams of travellers, mainly in khaki against civilian drabness, wound back among the benches behind the bookstall and, to the lady like annoyance of the loud-speaker, got mixed up in each other's queues.

Miles Hammond was not amused. As he put down his suitcase and waited under the clock, he was almost blind to everything about him.

What the devil, he said to himself, had he done?

What would Marion say? What would Steve say?

Yet if anybody on this earth represented sanity, it was his sister and her fiance. He was heartened to see them a few minutes later, Marion laden with parcels and Steve with a pipe in his mouth.

Marion Hammond, six or seven years younger than Miles, was a sturdy, nice-looking girl with black hair like her brother, but a practicality that he perhaps lacked. She was very fond of Miles an tirelessly humoured him; because she really did believe, though she never said so, that he was not mentally grown up. She was proud, of course, of a brother who could write such learned books, though Marion confessed sh didn't understand such things herself: the point was that books had no relation to serious affairs in life.

And, as Miles sometimes had to admit to himself, perhaps she was right.

So she came hurrying along under the echoing roof of Waterloo, well dressed even in this year because of new tricks with old clothes, her hazel eyes at ease with life under their dark straight brows, and intrigued―even pleased―by a new vagary of Mile's nature.

“Honestly, Miles!” said his sister. “Look at the clock! It's only a few minutes past four!”

“I know that.”

“But the train doesn't go until half-past five, dear. Even if we've got to be here early to have a prayer of getting a seat, why must you make us get here as early as this?” Then her sisterly eye caught the expression on his face, and she broke off. “Miles! What's wrong? Are you ill?”

“No, no, no!”

“Then what is it?”

“I want to talk to both of you,” said Miles. “Come with me.”

Stephen Curtis took the pipe out of his mouth. “Ho?” he observed.

Stephen's age might have been in the late thirties. He was almost completely bald―a sore subject with him―thought personable-enough looking and with much stolid charm. His fair moustache gave him a vaguely R.A.F. Appearance, though in fact he worked at the Ministry of Information and strongly resented jokes about this institution. He had met Marion there two years ago after being invalided out very early in the war. He and Marion, in fact, were themselves an institution already.

So he stood looking at Miles with interest from under the brim of a soft hat.

“Well?” prompted Stephen.

Opposite platform number eleven at Waterloo there is a restaurant, up two steep flights of stairs. Miles picked up his suitcase and led the way there. When they had installed themselves at a window table overlooking the station platform, in a big imitation-oak-panelled room only sparsely filled, Miles first ordered tea with care.

“There's a woman named Fay Seton,” he sad. “Six years ago, in France, sh was mixed up in a murder case. People accused her of some kind of unnamed bad conduct which set the whole district by the ears.” He paused. “I've engaged her to come to Greywood and catalogue the books.”

There was a long silence while Marion and Stephen looked at him. Again Stephen took the pipe out of his mouth.

“Why?” he asked.

“ don't know!” Miles answered honestly. “I'd made up my mind to have absolutely nothing to do with it. I was going to tell her firmly that the post had been filled. I couldn't sleep all last night for thinking about her face.

“Last night, eh? When did you meet her?”

“This morning.”

With great carefulness Stephen put down the pipe on the table between them. He pushed the bowl a fraction of an inch to the left, and then a fraction of an inch to the right, delicately.

“Look here, old man― he began.

“Oh, Miles,” cried his sister, “what is all this?”

“I'm trying to tell you!” Miles brooded. “Fay Seton was trained as a librarian. That's why both Barbara Morell and old What's-his-name, at the Murder Club, both looked so strange when I mentioned the library and said I was looking for a librarian. But Barbara was even quicker-minded than the old professor. She guessed. What with the present terrific labour shortage, if I went to the agencies for a librarian and Fay Seton was in the market for a job, it was twenty to one Fay would be sent to me. Yes. Barbara guessed in advance.”

And he drummed his fingers on the table.

Stephen removed his soft hat, showing the pinkish bald head above an intent, worried-looking face set in an expression of affection and expostulation.

“Let's get this straight,” he suggested. “Yesterday morning, Friday morning, you came to London in search of a librarian―

“Actually, Steve,” Marion cut in, “he'd been invited o a dinner of something called the Murder Club.”

“That,” said Miles, “was where I first heard about Fay Seton. I'm not crazy and this isn't at all mysterious. Afterwards I met her ...”

Marion smiled.

“And she told you some heart-rending story?” said Marion. “And your sympathies were roused as usual?”

“On the contrary, she doesn't even know I've heard a word about her. We simply sat in the lounge at the Berkeley and talked.”

“I see, Miles. Is she young?”

“Fairly young, yes.”

“Good-looking?”

“n a certain way, yes. But that wasn't what influenced me. It was―

“Yes, Miles?”

“Just something about her!” Miles gestured. “There isn't time to tell you the whole story. The point is that I have engaged her and she's travelling down with us by this afternoon's train. I thought I'd better tell you.”

Conscious of a certain relief, Miles sat back as the waitress came and clanked down tea-things on the table with a wrist-motion suggestive of someone throwing quoits. Outside, under the dusty windows beside which they sat, moved the endless sluggish knots of travellers in front of black white-numbered gates leading to the platforms.

And it suddenly occurred to Miles, as he watched his two companions, that history was repeating itself. There could be no persons more conventional better representing the traditions of home life, than Marion Hammond and Stephen Curtis. Exactly as Fay Seton had been introduced into the Brooke family six years ago, she would now enter another such household.

History repeating itself. Yes.

Marion and Stephen exchanged a glance. Marion laughed.

“Well, I don't know,” she observed, in the musing tone of a woman not altogether displeased. “It might be rather fun, in a way.”

“Fun?” exclaimed Stephen.

“Did you tell her, Miles, to be sure to bring her ration-book?”

“No.” His tone was bitter. “I'm afraid that detail escaped me.”

“Never mind, dear. We can always ...” Abruptly Marion sat up, a flash of consternation in her hazel eyes under the sensible straight brows. “Miles! Wait! This woman didn't poison anybody?” “My dear Marion,” said Stephen, “will you please tell me what difference it makes whether she poisoned anybody or shot anybody or beat in some old man's head with a poker? The point is―

“Just a minute,” interposed Miles quietly. He tried to be very quiet, very measured, and to control the thumping of his pulses. “I didn't say this girl was a murderess. On the contrary, if I have any judgment of human character, she certainly isn't anything of the kind.”

“Yes, dear,” Marion said indulgently, and leaned across the tea-service to pat his hand. “I'm sure you're quite convinced of that.”

“God damn it, Marion, will you stop misjudging my motives in this thing?”

“Miles! Please!” Marion clucked her tongue, more from force of habit than anything else. “We're in a public place.”

“Yes,” agreed Stephen. “Better lower your voice, old boy.”

“All right, all right! Only ...”

“Here!” soothed Marion, and poured tea with deftness. “Take this, and try on of the cakes. There! Isn't that better? This interesting lady of yours, Miles: how old did you say she was?”

“In her early thirties, I should think.”

“And going out as a librarian? How is it the Labour Exchange hasn't got her?”

“She's only just been repatriated from Frances.”

“From France? Really? I wonder if she's brought over any French perfume with her?”

“Come to think of it,” said Miles, who in fact could remember it quite well, “she was wearing some kind of perfume this morning. I happened to notice.”

“We want to hear all about her past history, Miles. There's plenty of time, and we can save an extra cup of tea for her in case she turns up soon. It wasn't poison? You're sure of that ? Steven, darling!―you're not having any tea!”

“Listen!” said Stephen, at last in the authoritative voice of one who calls for the floor.

Picking up his pipe from the table, he twisted at it and thrust it bowl-upwards into his breast-pocket.

“What can't understand,” he complained, “is how all this came about. Do they keep murderers at the Murder Club, or what? All right, Miles! Don't get on your high horse! I like to get my facts in order, that's all. How long will it take Miss What-is-it to put the books in order? A week or so?”

Miles grinned at him.

“Properly to catalogue that library, Steve, with all the cross-referencing of the old books, will take between two and three months.”

Even Marion looked startled.

“Well,” murmured Stephen, after a pause. “Miles will always do exactly what he wants to do. So that's all right. But I can't go back to Greywood with you this evening ...”

“You can't go back this evening?” cried Marion.

“My darling,” sad Steve, “I kept trying to tell you in the taxi―only you haven't the gift of worshipful silence―that there's a crisis on again at the office. It's only until tomorrow morning.” He hesitated. “I suppose it's all right to send you two down there alone with this interesting female?”

There was a brief silence.

Then Marion chortled with mirth.

“Steve! You are an idiot!”

“Am I? Yes. I suppose I am.”

“What can Fay Seton do to us?”

“Not being acquainted with the lady, I can't say. Nothing, actually.” Stephen smoothed at his cropped moustache. “It's only―

“Drink up your tea, Steve, and don't be so old-fashioned. I shall be glad of her help about the house. When Miles said he was going to employ a librarian I rather imagined an old man with a long white beard. What's more, I shall put her in my room, and that will give me an excuse to move into that glorious ground-floor room even if it does still smell of paint. It's tiresome about the Ministry of Information; but I don't think the woman will frighten us to death in one night even if you're not there. What train are you taking tomorrow morning?”

“Nine-thirty. And mind you don't mess around with that kitchen boiler unless I'm there to help. Let it alone, do you hear?”

“I'm a dutiful bride-to-be, Steve.”