He Who Whispers

Then Superintendent Hadley moved forward.

“Dr. Fell also asked me,” he went on, “whether we had any means of finding out Miss Seton's address, in case you”--he looked at Miles--”in case you by any chance missed her. I said naturally we had, since she must have taken out an identity card.” Hadley paused. “By the way, Miss Seton, have you got your identity card?”

The reflection of Fay's eyes regarded him in the mirror. She had almost finished making up; her hands were steady.

“Yes,” answered Fay.

“As a matter of form, may I see it?”

Fay took the card out of her handbag, gave it to him without comment, and turned back to the mirror. For some reason the look of wild strain was returning to her eyes as she picked up the powder compact again.

(What, thought Miles, is going on under all this?)

“I notice, Miss Seton, that this doesn't give any last address.”

“No. I've been living for the past six years in France.”

“So I understand. You've got a French identity card, of course.”

“I'm afraid not. I lost it.”

“What was your means of employment in France, Miss Seton?”

“I had no fixed means of employment.”

“Is that so?” Hadley's dark eyebrows went up, in contrast to the polish of his steel-grey hair. “Must have been a bit difficult to get rations there, wasn't it?”

“I had no—fixed means of employment.”

“But I understand you've trained professionally both as librarian and as secretary?”

“Yes. That's true.”

“In fact, come to think of it, you were employed as secretary by a Mr. Howard Brooke before his death in nineteen thirty-nine. Now there,” observed Hadley, as though suddenly struck by a new idea, “there's a case where we should be glad of a bit of help, to pass on to our French colleagues.”

(Watch the immense cat approach! Watch its devious courses!)

“But I was forgetting,” said Hadley, dismissing this so instantly that all three of his listeners jumped, “i was forgetting the real reason why I came here?”

“The real reason why you came here?”

“Yes, Miss Seton. Er—your identity car. Don't you want it back?”

“Thank you.”

Fay was compelled to turn around. She took the card from him; and then, in her grey dress and long damp tweed coat, sh stood with her back to the chest-of-drawers. Her body now hid the brief-case, which seemed to shout to heave. If Miles Hammond had been a thief with every seam of his pockets lined with stolen property, he could not have felt guiltier.

“Dr. Fell asked me,” pursued Hadley, “in a strictly unofficial way to keep an eye on you. It seems that you ran away from him . . .”

“I don't think I quite understand. I didn't run away.”

“With the intention of coming back again, of course! That's understood!”

Fay's eyes closed spasmodically, and opened again.

“Just before then, Miss Seton, Dr. Fell was going to ask you something very important.”

“Oh?”

“He instructed m to tell you that he hadn't put the question last night,” continued Hadley, “because he didn't guess then what he guesses at the present time. But he wants very much to have an answer to that question.” Hadley's tone changed only slightly; it was still polite, still casually inquiring; but the whole room seemed to grow warmer as he added:

“May I ask that question now?”

Chapter XVII

The hanging light over the chest-of-drawers shone down on Fay's hair, and brought out the warmth of it in contrast to the apparent coldness of her face and body.

“A question about . . .?” Her hand—Miles could have shouted a warning—instinctively moved toward the brief-case behind her.

“A question,” said Hadley, “In connection with the frightening of Miss Marion Hammond last night.” (Fay's hand darted back again; she straightened up.)

“And I'm afraid,” continued Hadley, “I must preface it by getting the situation clear. Don't mind my notebook, Miss Seton! It's not official. I've only put down what Fell asked me to put down.” His eyes strayed o the identity card in her hand. “Or do you refuse to answer questions, Miss Seton?”

“Do I ever—refuse?”

“Thank you. Now then: with regard tot the frightening of Miss Marion Hammond . . .”

“I didn't do it!”

“You may not be always conscious,” sad Hadley, “of what you do or the effect it has.”

Hadley's voice remained quiet when he said this.

“However!” he added quickly, and there was a penetrating quality about his gaze which made the eyes seem to grow larger. “We're not talking now about your conscious guilt or innocence in anything. I'm only trying (what shall I say?) to get this picture clear. As I understand it, you were the last person known to be with Marion Hammond before she was—frightened?”

Fay gave a quick, hypnotized nod.

“You left her alone in the bedroom in good health and spirits, at . . . about what time?”

“About midnight. I told Dr. Fell so.”

“Ah, yes. So you did— Had Miss Hammond undressed at this time?”

“Yes. She was in blue silk pyjamas. Sitting in a chair by the bedside table.”

“Now, Miss Seton! Considerably later, a shot was fired in Miss Hammond's room. Do you remember what time that was?”

“No. I'm afraid I haven't the remotest idea.”

Hadley swung around to Miles.

“Can you help us, Mr. Hammond? Everyone, including Dr. Fell himself, seems vague about times.”

“I can't help you,” answered Miles, “except in this one thing.” He paused, with the scene coming back to him. “After the shot, I ran up to Marion's bedroom. Professor Rigaud joined me, and a few minutes later Dr. Fell. Professor Rigaud asked me to go downstairs, to sterilize a hypodermic and do some other things in the kitchen. When I got to the kitchen, the time was twenty minutes to two. There's a big clock on the wall, and I remember noticing it.”

Hadley nodded. “So the time of the shot, roughly, was round about half-past one or a little later?”

“Yes. I should think so.”

“You agree with that, Miss Seton?”

“I'm afraid”--Fay lifted her shoulders--”I simply don't remember. I never paid any attention to the time.”

“But you did hear this shot?”

“Oh, yes. I was dozing.”

“And afterwards, I understand, you slipped upstairs and looked in at the bedroom door?--Excuse me, Miss Seton? I'm afraid I didn't quite catch that answer?”

“I said: yes.” Fay's lips shaped themselves with rounded distinctness. Something of last night's atmosphere returned to her, of heightened breathing and expression of eye.

“Your room is on the ground floor?”

“Yes.”

“When you heard this shot it the middle of the night, what made you think the noise came from upstairs? And from that room in particular?”

“Well! Soon after the shot I heard people running in the upstairs hall. Every sound carries at night.” For the first time Fay seemed honestly puzzled. “So I wondered what was wrong. I got up and put on a wrap and slippers, and lighted a lamp, and went upstairs. The door of Miss Hammond's room was wide open, and there was light inside. So I went there and peeped in.”

“What did you see?”

Fay moistened her lips.

“I saw Miss Hammond lying half in bed, holding a gun. I saw a man named Professor Rigaud—I'd known him before—standing on the far side of the bed. I saw,” she hesitated, “Mr. Miles Hammond. I heard Professor Rigaud say this was shock, and that Miss Hammond wasn't dead.”

“But you didn't go in? Or call out to them?”

“No!”

“What happened then?”

“I heard someone who sounded awfully heavy and clumsy start to walk up the front stairs at the other end of the hall,” answered Fay. “I know now it must have been Dr. Fell on his way to the bedroom. I turned out the lamp I was carrying, and ran down the back stairs. He didn't see me.”

“What was it that upset you, Miss Seton?”

“Upset me?”

“When you looked into that room,” Hadley told her with careful slowness, “You saw something that upset you. What was it?”

“I don't understand!”

“Miss Seton,” explained Hadley, putting away the notebook he had taken out of his inside breast pocket, “I've had to make all these elaborate inquiries to ask you just one question. You saw something, and it upset you so much that later you apologized to Mr. Hammond in Dr. Fell's presence for making what you called a disgraceful exhibition of yourself. You weren't frightened; the feeling wasn't in the least connected with fear. What upset you?”

Fay whirled round towards Miles. “Did you tell Dr. Fell?”

And Miles stared at her. “Tell him what?”

“What I said to you last night,” Fay retorted, her fingers twitching together, “when we were there in the kitchen and twitching together, “when we were there in the kitchen and I—I wasn't quite myself.”

“I didn't tell Dr. Fell anything,” Miles snapped, with a violence he could not understand. “And in any case what difference does it make?”

Miles took a step or two away from her. He bumped into Barbara, who also moved back. For a fraction of a second, as Barbara's head turned, he surprised on Barbara's face a look which completed his demoralization. Barbara's eyes had been fixed steadily on Fay for some time. In her eyes, slowly growing, was an expression of wonder; and of something else which was not dislike, but very near dislike.

If Barbara turns against her too, Miles thought, we might as well throw up the brief for the defense and retire. But Barbara of all people couldn't be turning against Fay! And Miles still fought back.

“I shouldn't answer any questions,” he said. “If Superintendent Hadley isn't here officially, he's got no blasted right to come barging in and hint that there'll be sinister consequences if you don't answer. Upset! Anybody would have been upset after what happened last night.” He looked at Fay again. “In any case, all you said to me was that you'd just seen something you hadn't noticed before, and . . .”

“Ah!” breathed Hadley, and rapped his bowler hat against the palm of his left hand. “Miss Seton had just seen something she hadn't noticed before! That's what we thought.”

Fay let out a cry.

“Why not tell us, Miss Seton?” suggested Hadley, in a tone of great persuasiveness. “Why not make the full confession you intended to make? If it comes to that, why not hand over the brief-case”--casually he pointed in the direction of it--”and the two thousand pounds and the other things as well? Why not . . .”

That was the point at which the light over the chest-of-drawers went out.

Nobody was prepared for danger. Nobody was alert. Everything was concentrated in that little space where Fay Seton faced Hadley and Miles and Barbara.

And, though nobody had touched the electric switch by the door, the light went out. With heavy black-out curtains drawn on the little windows, a weight of darkness descended on them like a hood over the face, blotting out rational thoughts as it blotted out images. There was a faint flicker of light from the passage outside as the door swiftly opened. And something rushed at them out of the passage.

Fay Seton screamed.

They heard the noise of it go piercing up. They heard a cry like, “Don't, don't, don't!” and a crashing sound as of someone falling over the big tin box in the middle of the floor. In a few seconds when Miles had forgotten a certain malignant influence, that influence had caught up with them. He lunged out in the darkness, and felt somebody's shoulder slip past him. The door to the passage banged. Somewhere there were running footsteps. Miles heard a rattle of rings as someone —it was Barbara—drew back the curtain of one window.

Grey rain-filtered light entered from Bolsover Place, along with the light from the moving teeth across the way. Superintendent Hadley ran to the window, flung it up, and blew a police-whistle.

Fay Seton, unhurt, had been thrown back against the bed. She clutched at the counterpane to save herself from falling, and dragged it with her as she sank to her knees.

“Fay! Are you all right?”

Fay hardly heard him. She whipped round, her eyes going instinctively towards the top of the chest-of-drawers.

“Are you all right?”

“It's gone,” said Fay in a choked voice. “It's gone. It's gone.”

For the brief-case was no longer there. Ahead of anyone else, ahead of either Miles or Hadley, Fay jumped over the heavy tin box and ran towards the door. She ran with a headlong madness and an agility which carried her half-way down the passage, in the direction of the stairs, before Miles went racing after her.

And even the brief-case could not stop that crazy flight.

For Miles found the brief-case lying discarded on the floor of the passage, dimly seen in the light of the opening and shutting teeth. Fay must have run straight across it; she could not even have noticed it. Miles shouted to her as she gained the top of the steep stairs leading down to the ground floor. He snatched up the brief-case holding it upside down as though to gain her ye by pantomime. From inside the gaping leather there fell out three packets of bank-notes like the other in the bedroom. These landed on the floor, along with a pouring of some dry gritty substance like mortar-dust. There was nothing else in the brief-case.

Miles flung himself at the head of the stairs.

“It's here, I tell you! It's not gone! It's been dropped ! It's here!”

Did she hear him? He could not be sure. But, at least briefly, she paused and looked up.

Fay was about half-way down the stairs, steep stairs covered with ragged linoleum. Th front door of the house stood wide open, so that light from the window across the street filtered weirdly up the staircase.

Miles, leaning perilously over the balustrade along the passage and holding up the brief-case, was looking down into her face as she raised it.

“Don't you understand? He shouted. “There's no need to run like that! Here is the brief-case! It's . . .”

Now he could have sworn she hadn't heard. Fay's left hand rested lightly on the stair-rail. Her neck was arched, the red hair thrown back as she looked up. On her face was a faintly wondering look. Her heightened colours, even the glitter of her eyes, seemed to fade into a deathly bluish pallor which put a gentle expression on her mouth and then took away all expression at all.

Fay's legs gave way at the knees. Softly, like a dress falling from a hook, so bonelessly that it could not even have caused a bruise, she fell sideways and rolled over and over to the floor of the stairs. Yet the crash of the fall, in contrast to that terrifying limpness . . .

Miles Hammond stood still.

The stifling, mildewy air of the passage had got into his lungs like the sudden suspicion in his mind. He seemed to have been breathing that air for a very long time, with the blood-stained banknotes in his pockets and the cracked brief-case in his hand.

Out of the corner of his eye Miles saw Barbara come up beside him and look down over the railing. Superintendent Hadley, muttering something under his breath, bounded past them and went downstairs with long strides which shook and thumped on every tread. He jumped over the figure lying at the foot of the stairs with its cheek against the dirt of the floor. Hadley went down on one knee to examine that figure. Presently he raised his head to look up at them. His voice sounded hollowly up the stairs.

“Wasn't this woman supposed to have a weak heart?”

“Yes,” said Miles calmly. “Yes. That's right.”

“We'd better ring for an ambulance,” the hollow voice replied. “But she shouldn't have got worked up and run like that. I think it's finished her.

Miles walked slowly downstairs.

His left hand rested on the balustrade where Fay's hand had rested. He dropped the brief-case as he walked. Across the street, seen now through an open front door, the ugly bodiless teeth very slowly opened and closed, opened and closed throughout all eternity, as he bent over Fay's body.

Chapter XVIII

It was half-past six o'clock on that same Sunday evening, though it might have been days later as regards the apparent passage of time, when Miles and Barbara sat in Fay Seton's bedroom up on the first floor.

The electric light was burning again over the chest-of-drawers. Barbara sat in the frayed armchair. Miles sat on the edge of the bed, beside Fay's black beret. He was looking at the battered tin box when Barbara spoke.

“Shall we go out an see if there's a Lyons or an A.B.C. Open on Sunday? Or a pub where they might have a sandwich?”

“No. Hadley told us to stay here.”

“How long has it been since you last had anything to eat?”

“One of the greatest gifts with which a woman can be endowed”--Miles tried to manage a smile, though he felt the smile stretch like a sick leer--”is the gift of not mentioning the subject of food at inconvenient times.”

“Sorry,” said Barbara, an was silent for a long time. “Fay may recover you know.”

“Yes. She may recover.”

And then the silence went on for a very long time, while Barbara plucked at the edges of the chair-arms.

“Does this mean so very much to you, Miles?”

“That isn't the main point at all. I simply felt that this woman has been given the worst possible raw deal from life. That things ought to be put right somehow! That justice ought to be done! That . . .”

He picked up Fay's black beret from the bed, and hastily put it down again.

“Anyway,” he added, “what's the use?”

“In the short time you've known her,” said Barbara, evidently after another struggle to keep silent, “did Fay Seton become as real as Agnes Sorel or Pamela Hoyt?”

“I beg you pardon? What's that?”

“At Beltring's,” answered Barbara without looking at him, “you said a historian's work was to take distant people, dead and gone people, and bring them to life by thinking of them as real people. When you first heard Fay's story, you said she was no more real than Agnes Sorel or Pamela Hoyt.”

In an inconsequential way, still plucking at the edges of the char-arm, Barbara added:

“Agnes Sorel I'd heard of, of course. But I never heard of Pamela Hoyt. I—I looked her up in the encyclopaedia, but sh wasn't there.”

“Pamela Hoyt was a Regency beauty suspected of evil courses. A captivating character, too; I read quite a lot about her at one time. By the way: in Latin, what does panes mean beside the plural of bread? It couldn't have meant bread, from the context.”

It was Barbara's turn to blink at him in surprise.

“I'm afraid I'm not enough of a Latinist to know. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I had a dream.”

“A dream?”

“Yes.” Miles pondered this in the heavy, dully insistent way with which the mind will seize on trifles at a time of emotional disturbance. “It was a passage in mediaeval Latin; you know the sort of thing: peculiar verb-endings and u's instead of v's.” He shook his head. “All about something and panes; but all I can remember now is the ut- clause at the end, that it would be most foolish to deny something.”

“I still don't understand.”

(Why wouldn't that infernally sickish feeling leave his chest?)

“Well, I dreamed I went into the library looking for a Latin dictionary. Pamela Hoyt and Fay Seton were both there, sitting on dusty mounds of books and assuring me my uncle hadn't got a Latin dictionary.” Miles started to laugh. “Funny thing, too; just remembered it. I don't know what Dr. Freud would have made of that one.”

“I do,” said Barbara.

“Something sinister, I imagine. It would appear to be something sinister no matter what you dream.”

“No,” said Barbara slowly. “Nothing like that.”

For some time she had been regarding Miles in the same hesitant, baffled, helpless way, the luminous whites of her eyes shining in sympathy. Then Barbara sprang to her feet. Both windows had been opened to the drizzling afternoon, admitting clean damp air. At least, Miles reflected, they had shut off the advertising lights and that dental horror across the street. Barbara turned at the window.

“Poor woman!” Barbara sad, and he knew she was not referring to a dead Pamela Hoyt. “Poor, silly, romantic . . .!”

“Why do you call Fay silly and romantic?”

“She knew those anonymous letters, and all the rumours about her, were the work of Harry Brooke. But she never said so to anybody. I suppose,” Barbara shook her head slowly, “she may still have been in love with him.”

“After that?”

“Of course.”

“I don't believe it!”

“It might have been that. We all—we all are capable of awfully funny things. Or,” Barbara shivered, “there may have been some other reason for keeping silent, even after she knew Harry was dead. I don't know. The point it . . .”

“The point is,” said Miles, “why is Hadley keeping us here? And what's going on?” He considered. “Is it very far to this What's-its-name Hospital where they've taken her?”

“A goodish distance, yes. Were you thinking of going there?”

“Well, Hadley can't keep us here indefinitely for no apparent reason at all. We've got to get SOME kind of news.”

They received some kind of news. Professor Georges Antoine Rigaud—they heard his distinctive step long before they saw him— came slowly up the stairs, along the passage, and in at the open door.

Professor Rigaud seemed an older and even more troubled man than when he had voiced his theory about a vampire. Only a few drops of rain fell now, so that he was comparatively dry. His soft dark hat was jammed down all round his head. His patch of moustache worked with the movement of his mouth. He leaned heavily on the yellow sword-cane which acquired such evil colour in this dingy room.

“Mees Morell,” he said. His voice was husky. “Mr. Hammond. Now I will tell you something.”

He moved forward from the door.

“My friends, you are no doubt familiar with the great Musketeer romances of the elder Dumas. You will recall how the Musketeers went to England. You will recall that the only two words of English known to D'Artagnan were 'Come' and 'God damn.'” He shook a thick arm in the air. “Would that my knowledge of the English language were confined to the same harmless and uncomplicated terms!”

Miles sprang from the edge of the bed.

“Never mind D'Artagnan, Professor Rigaud. How did you get here?”

“Dr. Fell and I,” said the other, “have arrived back by car from the New Forest. We have telephoned his friend the police superintendent. Dr. Fell goes to the hospital, and I come here.”

“You've just come from the New Forest. How's Marion?”

“In health,” returned Professor Rigaud, “she is excellent. She is sitting up and eating food and talking what you call twenty to the dozen.”

“Then in that case,” cried Barbara, and swallowed before she went on, “you know what frightened her?”

“Yes, mademoiselle. We have heard what frightened her?”

And Professor Rigaud's face slowly grew pale, paler than it had been when he talked of vampires.

“My friend,” he pounced out at Miles, as though he guessed the direction of the latter's thoughts, “I gave you theories about a certain supernatural agency. Well! It would appear that in this case I was misled by facts intended to mislead. But I do not put myself in ashes and sackcloth for that. No! For I would say to you that one case of an agency proved spurious no more disproves the existence of such supernatural agencies than a forged banknote disproves the existence of the Bank of England. Do you concede this?”

“Yes, I concede it. But . . .”

“No!” reiterated Professor Rigaud, wagging his head portentously and rapping the ferrule of the cane against the floor. “I do not put myself in ashes and sackcloth for that. I put myself in ashes and sackcloth because—in fine, because this is worse.”

He held up the sword-cane.

“May I make to you, my friend, a small present? May I give you this treasured relic.? Don not, now, find as much satisfaction in it as others find in the headstone of Dougal or a pen-wiper made of human flesh. I am human. My gorge can rise. May I give it to you?”

“No, I don't want the infernal thing! Put it away! What we're trying to ask you . . .”

“Justement!” said Professor Rigaud, and flung the sword-cane on the bed.

“Marion is all right?” miles insisted. “There can't be any relapse of any kind?”

“There cannot.”

“Then this thing that frightened her.” Miles braced himself. “What did she see?”

“She saw,” replied the other concisely, “nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Exactly.”

“Yet she was frightened as much as that without being harmed in any way?”

“Exactly,” assented Professor Rigaud, and made angry little frightened noises in his throat. “She was frightened by something she heard and something she felt. Notably by the whispering.”

“The whispering . . .

If Miles Hammond had hoped to get away from the realm of monsters and nightmares, he found that he had not been permitted to over very far. He glanced at Barbara, who only shook her head helplessly. Professor Rigaud was still making the little seething noises in his throat, like a kettle boiling; but the noises were not funny. His eyes had a strangled, congested look.

“This thing,” he cried, “is a thing that could be managed by you or me or Jacques Bonhomme. Its simplicity horrifies me. And yet--”

He broke off.

Outside in Bolsover Place, with a squeal of brakes and a bumping on the uneven paving-stones, a motor-car pulled up. Professor Rigaud stumped over to one window. He flung up his arms.

“Dr. Fell,” he added, turning round from the window again, “arrives back from the hospital sooner than I expected him. I must go.”

“Go? Why must you go? Professor Rigaud!”

The good professor was not permitted to go very far. For the bulk of Dr. Gideon Fell, hatless but in his box-pleated cape, impelled mightily on the crutch-handled stick, had the effect of filling up the stairs, filling up the passage, and finally filling up the doorway. It had the effect of preventing any exit except by way of the window, which presumably was not Professor Rigaud's intention. So Dr. Fell stood there with a gargantuan swaying motion rather like a tethered elephant, still rather wild-eyed and with his eyeglasses coming askew, controlling his breathing for Johnsonesque utterance to Miles.

“Sir,” he began, “I bring you news.”

“Fay Seton--?”

“Fay Seton is alive,” replied Dr. Fell. Then, with a clatter you could almost hear, he swept that hope away. “How long she lives will depend on the care she takes of herself. It may be months; it may be days, I fear I must tell you she is a doomed woman, as in a sense she has always been a doomed woman.”

For a little time nobody spoke.

Barbara, Miles noted in an abstracted way, was standing just where Fay had stood; by the chest-of-drawers, under the hanging lamp. Barbara's fingers were pressed to her lips in an expression of horror mingled with overwhelming pity.

“Couldn't we,” said Miles, clearing his throat, “couldn't we go over to the hospital and see her?”

“No, sir,” returned Dr. Fell.

For the first time Miles noticed that there was a police-sergeant in the hall behind Dr. Fell. Motioning to this sergeant, Dr. Fell squeezed his way through and closed the door behind him.

“I have just come from talking to Miss Seton,” he went on. “I have heard the whole pitiful story.” His expression was vaguely fierce. “It enables me o fill in the details of my own guesses and half-hits.” As Dr. Fell's expression grew more fierce, he put up a hand partly to adjust his eyeglasses and partly perhaps to shade his eyes. “But that, you see, causes the trouble.”

Miles' disquiet had increased.

“What do you mean, trouble?”

“Hadley will be here presently, with—harrumph--a certain duty to perform. Its result will not be pleasant for one person now in this room. That's why I thought I had better come here first and warn you. I thought I had better explain to you certain matters you may not have grasped even yet.”

“Certain matters? About--?”

“About those two crimes,” said Dr. Fell. He peered at Barbara as though noticing her for the first time. “Oh, ah!” breathed Dr. Fell with an air of enlightenment. “And you must be Miss Morell!”

“Yes! I want to apologize . . .”

“Tut, tut! Not for the famous fiasco of the Murder Club?”

“Well . . . yes.”

“A small matter,” said Dr. Fell, with a massive gesture of dismissal.

He lumbered to the frayed armchair, which had been pushed near one window. With the aid of his crutch-handled stick he sat down, the armchair accommodating him as best it could. After rolling back his shaggy head to take a reflective survey of Barbara, of Miles, an of Professor Rigaud, he reached into his inside breast pocket under the cape. From this he produced Professor Rigaud's sheaf of manuscript, now much crumpled and frayed at the edges.

And he produced something else which Miles recognized. It was the coloured photograph of Fay Seton, last seen by Miles at Beltring's Restaurant. With the same air of ferocity overlying bitter worry and distress, Dr. Fell sat studying the photograph.

“Dr. Fell,” said Miles. “Hold on! Half a minute!”

The doctor rolled up his head.

“Eh? Yes? What is it?”

“I suppose Superintendent Hadley's told you what happened in this room a couple of hours ago?”

“H'mf, yes. He's told me.”

“Barbara and I came in here and found Fay standing where Barbara is now, with the brief-case and a bundle of blood-stained banknotes. I—er--shoved those notes into my pocket just before Hadley arrived. I needn't have bothered. After asking a lot of questions which seemed to tend towards Fay's guilt, he showed he knew about the brief-case all along.”

Dr. Fell frowned. “Well?”

“At the height of the questioning, this light went out. Somebody must have thrown the main-switch in the fuse-box just outside in the passage. Someone or something rushed in here . . .”

“Someone,” repeated Dr. Fell, “or something. By thunder, I like the choice of words!”

“Whoever it was, it threw Fay to one side and ran out of here with the brief-case. We didn't see anything. I picked up the brief-case outside a minute later. It had nothing in it but the three other packets of notes and a little gritty dust. Hadley took the whole lot away with him, including my concealed notes, when he left with Fay in the –in the ambulance.

Miles gritted his teeth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“With pleasure. Barbara?”

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

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

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

Miles stared at him.

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

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

“But what?”

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

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

Silence.

A silence which stretched out unendurably . . .

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

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

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

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

Dr. Fell paused.

Again he took up the photograph and studied it.

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

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

Barbara made a helpless gesture.

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

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

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

And Barbara turned away.

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

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

“The same criminal?” cried Barbara.

And Dr. Fell nodded.

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

Chapter XIX

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

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

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

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

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

Again Barbara protested.

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

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

“But this time—no! This time is different. We have changed all that. This time she is really in love, romantically as well as physically, and it will work out. After all, nobody has been able to say a word against her since she has come to France as Mr. Brooke's secretary.

“And all this time Harry Brooke—never seeing anything, drawing on what Harry thinks is his imagination—had been driving his father to distraction with anonymous letters against Fay. Harry's only concern was to get his own way; to get to Paris and study painting. What did he care for a rather silent, passive girl, who tended to draw away from his embraces and remained half cold when he kissed her? Thunderation, no! Give him somebody with a bit of life!

“Irony? I rather think so.

“And then the figurative storm broke. On the twelfth of August, somebody stabbed Mr. Brooke. Let me show you how.”

Miles Hammond turned round abruptly.

Miles walked over and sat down beside Professor Rigaud on the edge of the bed. Neither of these two, though for different reasons, had spoken a word in some time.

“Yesterday morning,” pursued Dr. Fell, putting down his filled pipe to pick up the sheaf of manuscript and weigh it in his hand, “my friend Georges Rigaud brought me this account of the case. If I quote from it at any time, you two others will perhaps recognize that Rigaud used exactly the same words when telling it you verbally.

“He also showed me a certain sword-stick of evil memory.” Dr. Fell blinked across at Professor Rigaud. “Have you—harrumph--by any chance got the same weapon here now?”

With an angry, half-frightened gesture Professor Rigaud picked up the sword-cane and flung it across the room. Dr. Fell caught it neatly. But Barbara, as though it had been attack, backed away against the closed door.

“Ah, zut!” cried Professor Rigaud, and shook his arms in the air.

“You doubt my remarks, sir?” inquired Dr. Fell. “You did not doubt when I gave you a very short sketch earlier today.”

“No, no, no!” said Professor Rigaud. “What you say about this woman Fay Seton is right, is absolutely right. I claim a point when I said to you that the characteristics of the vampire are also in folklore the characteristics of eroticism. But I kick me the pants because I, the old cynic, do not see all this for myself!”

“Sir,” returned Dr. Fell, “you acknowledge yourself that you are not much interested in material clues. That is why, even when you were writing about it, you failed to observe . . .”

“Observe what?” said Barbara. “Dr. Fell, who killed Mr. Brooke?”

Outside there was a distant crash of thunder, which made the window-frames vibrate and startled them all. The rain, in this wet June, was going to return.

“Let me,” said Dr. Fell, “simply outline to you the events of that afternoon. You will see for yourselves, when you dovetail the story of Professor Rigaud with the story of Fay Seton herself, what deductions are to be drawn from them.

“Mr. Howard Brooke returned to Beauregard from the Credit Lyonnais bank about three o'clock, carrying the brief-case with the money. The events of the murder properly begin then, and we can follow them from there. Where were the other members of the household at this time?

“At just before three o'clock Fay Seton left the house, carrying bathing-dress and towel, to go for a walk northwards along the river bank. Mrs. Brooke was in the kitchen, speaking to the cook. Harry Brooke was—or had been—upstairs in his own room, writing a letter. We know now that it was this letter.”

Dr. Fell held up the letter.

With a significant grimace he continued:

“Mr. Brooke, then, returned at three and asked for Harry. Mrs. Brooke replied that Harry was upstairs in his own room. Harry in the meantime, believing his father would be at the office (as Rigaud did too; see testimony) and never dreaming he might be on his way home, had left the letter unfinished and gone to the garage.

“Mr. Brooke went up to Harry's room, and presently came down again. Now we see—just here—the curious change in Howard Brooke's behavior. He wasn't frantically angry then, Howard Brooke's behavior. He wasn't frantically angry then, as he had been before. Listen, from the evidence, to his wife's description of his manner as he came down the stairs: 'so pitiful he looked, and so aged, and walking slowly as though he were ill.'

“What had he found, up there in Harry's room?

“Oh Harry's desk he saw an unfinished letter. He glanced at it; he glanced at it again, startled; he picked it up and read it through. And his whole honest, comfortable universe crashed down in ruins.

“Carefully outlined, in closely written pages to Jim Morell, was a resume of Harry's whole scheme to blacken Fay Seton. The anonymous letters; the discreditable rumours; the vampire hoax. And all this was written down by his son Harry—his absolute idol, that hearty innocent—so that the father should be filthily tricked into giving Harry his own way.

“Do you wonder that it struck him dumb? Do you wonder that he looked like that as he walked downstairs, and slowly—how very slowly!--out along the river-bank towards the tower? He had made an appointment with Fay Seton for four o'clock. He was going to keep that appointment. But I see Howard Brooke as a thoroughly honest man, a straight-forward man who would loathe this worse than anything Harry could have done. He would meet Fay Seton at the tower, all right. But he was going there to apologize.

Dr. Fell paused.

Barbara shivered. She glanced at Miles, who sat in a kind of trance, and checked herself from speaking.

“Let us return, however,” pursued Dr. Fell, “to the known facts. Mr. Brooke, in the tweed cap and raincoat he had been wearing at the Credit Lyonnais, went towards the tower. Five minutes later, who turned up? Harry, by thunder!--hearing that his father had been there, and asking where he was now, Mrs. Brooke told him. Harry stood for a moment 'thinking to himself, muttering.' Then he followed his father.”

Here Dr. Fell bent forward with great earnestness.

“now for a point which isn't mentioned by Rigaud or in the official records. It isn't mentioned because nobody bothered with it. Nobody thought it was important. The only person who has mentioned it is Fay Seton, though she wasn't there when it happened and couldn't have known it at all unless she had special reason for knowing.

“But this is what she told Miles Hammond last night. She said that, when Harry Brooke left the house in pursuit of Mr. Brooke, Harry Brooke snatched up his raincoat.”

Dr. Fell glanced over at Miles.

“You remember that, my boy?”

“Yes,” said Miles, conquering a shaky throat. “But why shouldn't Harry have taken a raincoat? After all, it was a drizzling day!”

Dr. Fell waved him to silence.

“Professor Rigaud,” Dr. Fell continued, “followed both father and son to the tower some considerable time afterwards. At the door of the tower, unexpectedly, he met Fay Seton.

“The girl told him that Harry and Mr. Broke were upstairs on top of the tower, having an argument. She declared she hadn't heard a word what father and son were saying; but her eyes, testifies Rigaud, were the eyes of one who remembers a horrible experience. She said she wouldn't interrupt at that moment, and in a frantic state of agitation she ran away.

“On top of the tower Rigaud found Harry and his father, also very agitated. Both were pale and worked up. Harry seemed to be pleading, while his father demanded to be allowed to attend to 'this situation'--whatever it was—in his own way, and harshly told Rigaud to take Harry away.

“At this time Harry certainly wore no raincoat; he was hatless and coatless, in a corduroy suit described by Rigaud. The sword-stick, untouched with blade screwed into sheath, rested against the parapet. So did the brief-case, but for some reason it had become a bulging brief-case.

“That extraordinary word struck me when I first read the manuscript.

“Bulging!

“Now the brief-case certainly hadn't been like that when Howard Brooke showed its contents to Rigaud at the Credit Lyonnais. Inside, in 'solitary state'--I quote Rigaud's own words—were four slender packets of banknotes. Nothing else! But now, when Rigaud and Harry left Mr. Brooke alone on the tower, there was something stuffed away inside it . . .

“Look here!” added Dr. Fell.

And he held up the yellow sword-cane.

Treating it with extraordinary care, he unscrewed the handle, took the thin blade from the hollow stick, and held it up.

“This weapon,” he said, “was found after the murder of Mr. Brooke lying in two halves: the blade near the victim's foot, the sheath rolled away against the parapet. The two halves were not joined until long afterwards days after the murder. The police took them away, for expert examination, just as they were found.

“In other words,” explained Dr. Fell with thunderous fierceness, “They were not joined together until long after the blood had dried. Yet there are stains of blood inside the scabbard. O tempora! O mores! Doesn't that mean anything to you?”

Raising his eyebrows in hideous pantomime, Dr. Fell peered round at his companions as though urging them on.

“I've got a horrible half-idea I do know what you mean!” cried Barbara. “But I—I don't quite see it yet. All I can think of is . . .”

“Is what?” asked Dr. Fell.

“Is Mr. Brooke,” said Barbara. “Walking out of the house after he'd read Harry's letter. Walking slowly towards the tower. Trying to realize what his son had done. Trying to make up his mind what to do.”

“Yes,” Dr. Fell said quietly. “Let us follow him.

“Harry Brooke, I dare swear, must have felt a trifle sick when he learned from his mother about Mr. Brooke's unexpected return home. Harry remembered his own unfinished letter lying upstairs, where Mr. Brooke had just been. Had the old man read it? That was the important point. So Harry put on a raincoat—let's believe he did—and rand out after his father.

“He reached the tower. He found that Mr. Brooke, for that solitude we want when we're hurt, had climbed up to the top. Harry followed him there. One look at his father's face, in that dark, windy, drizzling light, must have shown him that Howard Brooke knew everything.

“Mr. Brooke would hardly have been slow to pour out what he had just learned. And Fay Seton, on the stairs, heard the whole thing.

“She had returned from her stroll northwards along the river-bank, as she tells us, about half-past three. She had not yet gone in for a swim; her costume was still over her arm. She wandered into the tower. She heard frantic voices coming from above. And softly, on her openwork rubber-soled sandals, she crept up the stairs.

“Fay Seton, poised on that curving staircase in the gloom, not only heard but saw everything that went on. She saw Harry and his father, each wearing a raincoat. She saw the yellow cane propped against the parapet, the brief-case lying on the floor, while Howard Brooke gesticulated.

“What wild recrimination did the father pour out then? Did he threaten to disown Harry? Possibly. Did he swear that Harry should never see Paris or painting as long as his life lasted? Probably. Did he repeat, with a kind of incredulous disgust, all that beautiful Harry had done against the reputation of the girl who was in love with him? Almost certainly.

“And Fay Seton heard it.

“But sick as that must have made her, she was to hear and see worse.

“For such scenes sometimes get out of control. This one did. The father suddenly turned away, past speech; turned his back on Harry as he was to do later. Harry saw the ruin of all his plans. He saw no soft life for himself now. And something snapped in his head. In a child's fury he snatched up the sword-stick, twisted it out of its scabbard, and stabbed his father through the back.”

Dr. Fell, uneasy through all his bulk at his own words, fitted together the two halves of the sword-stick. Then he put it down quietly on the floor.

Neither Barbara nor Miles nor Professor Rigaud spoke, during a silence while you might have counted ten. Miles slowly rose to his feet. The torpor was leaving him. Gradually he saw . . .

“The blow,” Miles said, “was struck just then?”

“Yes. The blow was struck just then.”

“And the time?”

“The time,” returned Dr. Fell, “was nearly ten minutes to four. Professor Rigaud there was very close to the tower.

“The wound made by the blade was a deep, thin wound: the sort, we find in medical jurisprudence, that makes the victim think he is not at all badly hurt. Howard Brooke saw his son standing there white-faced and stupid, hardly realizing what he had done. What were the father's reactions to all this? If you know men like Mr. Brooke, you can prophesy exactly.

“Fay Seton, silent and unseen, had fled down the stairs. In the doorway she met Rigaud and ran from him. And Rigaud, hearing the voices upstairs, put his head inside the tower and shouted up to them.

“In his narrative Rigaud tells us that the voices stopped instantly. By thunder, they did!

“For, let me repeat, what were Howard Brooke's feelings about all this? He had just heard the hail of a family friend, Rigaud, who will be up those stairs as soon as a stout man can climb them. Was Mr. Brooke's instinct, in the middle of this awkward mess, to denounce Harry? Lord of all domestic troubles, no! Just the opposite! His immediate desperate wish was to hush things up, to pretend somehow that nothing at all had happened.

“I think it was the father who snarled to the son: 'Give me your raincoat!' And I am sure it was quite natural for him to do so.

“You-harrumph—perceive the point?

“In the back of his own raincoat, as he saw by whipping it off, was a tear through which blood had soaked. But a good lined raincoat will do more than turn rain from outside. It will also keep blood from showing through from inside. If he wore Harry's coat, and somehow disposed of his own, he could conceal that ugly bleeding wound in his back . . .

“You guess what he did. He hastily rolled up his own raincoat, stuffed it into the brief-case, and fastened the straps. He thrust the sword-blade back into its scabbard (hence the blood inside); he tightened its threads and propped it up again. He put on Harry's raincoat. By the time Rigaud had toiled to the top of the stairs, Howard Brooke was ready to prevent scandal.

“But, my eye! How that whole tense shivery scene of top of the tower takes on a different aspect if you read it like this!

“The pale-faced son stammering, 'But, sir--!' The father in a cold buttoned-up voice, 'For the last time, will you allow me to deal with this matter in my own way?' This matter! And then, flaring out: 'Will you take my son away from here until I have adjusted certain matters to my own satisfaction? Take him anywhere!' And the father turns his back.

“There was a chill in the voice, a chill in the heart. You sensed it, my dear Rigaud, when you spoke of Harry, beaten and deflated, being led dumbly down those stairs. And Harry's sullen shining eye in the woo, while Harry wondered what in God's name the old man was going to do.

“Well, what was the old man going to do? He was going to get home, of course, with that incriminating raincoat decently hidden in his brief-case. There he could hide scandal. My son tried to kill me! That was the worst revulsion of all. He was going to get home. And then . . .”

“Continue, please!” prompted Professor Rigaud, snapping his fingers in the air as Dr. Fell's voice died away. “This is the part I have not followed. He was going to get home. And them--?”

Dr. Fell looked up.

“He found he couldn't,” Dr. Fell said simply. “Howard Brooke knew he was fainting. And he suspected he might be dying.

“He saw quite clearly he couldn't get down that steep spiral stair, forty feet above ground, without pitching forward into space. He would be found fainting here—if nothing worse—wearing Harry's raincoat and his own pierced bloodstained raincoat in the brief-case. Questions would be asked. The facts, properly interpreted, would be utterly damning to Harry.

“Now that man really loved his son. He had got two dazing revelations that afternoon. He meant to be very severe with the boy. But he wouldn't see Harry, poor idolized Harry, really in serious trouble. So he id the obvious thing, the only possible thing, to show he must have been attacked after Harry left.

“With his last strength he took his own raincoat out of the brief-case, an put it on again. Harry's now blood-stained too, he thrust into the case. He must get rid of that brief-case somehow. In a sense that was easy, because there was water just below.

“But he couldn't simply drop it over the edge, though the police of Chartres in their suicide theory thought he might accidentally have knocked it over. He couldn't drop it, for the not-very-abstruse reason that the brief-case would float.

“However, on the battlements of the parapet facing the riverside were big crumbling fragments of loose rock. These could be wrenched loose and put into the brief-case, fastened in with the straps, and the weighted case would sink.

“He managed to drop it over. He managed to take the sword-cane from ts scabbard, wipe its handle free from any trace of Harry's touch—that of course was why only his own fingerprints were found on it—and throw the two halves on the floor. Then Howard Brooke collapsed. He was not dead when the screaming child found him. He was not dead when Harry and Rigaud arrived. He died in Harry's arms, clinging pathetically to Harry and trying to assure his murderer it would be all right.

“God rest the man's soul,” added Dr. Fell, slowly putting up his hands to cup them over his eyes.

For a time Dr. Fell's wheezing breaths were the only sound in that room. A few drops of rain splattered outside the windows.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Dr. Fell, taking his hands away from his eyes and regarding his companions soberly, “I submit this to you now. I submit t, as I could have submitted it last night after reading the manuscript and hearing the report of Fay Seton's story, as the only feasible explanation of how Howard Brooke met his death.

“The stains inside the sword-stick, showing the blade must have been put back in the sheath and then taken out again before it was found! The bulging brief-case! Harry's disappearing raincoat! The missing fragments of rock from the parapet! The curious question of fingerprints!

“For the secret of this apparent miracle—which was not intended to be a mystery at all-lies in a very simple fact. It is the fact that one man's raincoat looks very much like another man's raincoat.

“We don't write our names in raincoats. They are not of a distinctive colour. They are made only in a few stock sizes; and we know that Harry Brooke “in height and weight,' as Rigaud says, was like his father. Among Englishmen especially it is a point of pride, even of caste and gentlemanliness, for his raincoat to be as old and disreputable as possible without becoming an actual eyesore. When next you go into a restaurant, observe the line of bedraggle objects hanging on coat-pegs and you will understand.

“Our friend Rigaud here never dreamed he had sen Mr. Brooke in two different coats at two different times. Since Mr. Brooke was actually dying in his own coat, nobody else ever suspected. Nobody that is, except Fay Seton.”

Professor Rigaud got to his feet and took little short steps up and down the room.

“She knew?” he demanded.

“Undoubtedly.”

“But after I saw her for a moment at the door of the tower, and she ran away from me, what did she do?”

“I can tell you,” Barbara said quietly.

Professor Rigaud, fussed and fussy, made gestures as though he would try to shush her.

“You mademoiselle? And how would it occur to you to know?”

“I can tell you,” answered Barbara simply, “because it's what I should have done myself.” Barbara's eyes were shining with a light of pain and sympathy. “Please let me go on! I can see it!

“Fay went for a swim in the river, just as she said she did. She wanted to feel cool; she wanted o feel clean. She'd really-really fallen in love with Harry Brooke. IN circumstances like that it'd be easy” Barbra shook her head, “to convince yourself . . . well! That the past was the past. That this was a new life.

“And then she'd just crept up to the tower, and heard. She heard what Harry had said about her. As though instinctively he knew it was true! As though the whole world could look at her and know it was true. She'd seen Harry stab his father, but she didn't think Mr. Brooke was seriously hurt.

“Fay dived into the river, and floated down towards the tower. There were no witnesses on that side, remember! And—of course!” cried Barbara. “Fay saw the brief-case fall from the tower!” Barbara afire with this new realization, turned to Dr. Fell. “Isn't that true?”

Dr. Fell inclined his head gravely.

“That, ma'am, is whang in the gold.”

“She dived down and got the brief-case. She carried it with her when she left the river, and hid it in the woods. Fay didn't know what was going on, of course; she didn't realize until later what must have happened.” Barbara hesitated. “Miles Hammond told me, on the way here, what her own story was. I think she never realized what was going on until . . .”

“Until,” supplied Miles, with an intensity of bitterness, “until Harry Brooke came rushing up to her, exuding hypocritical shock, and cried out, 'My God, Fay, somebody's killed Dad.' No wonder Fay looked a trifle cynical when sh told me!”

“One moment!” said Professor Rigaud.

After first giving the impression of hopping up and down, though in fact he did not move, Professor Rigaud raised his forefinger impressively.

“In this cynicism,” he declared, “I begin to see a meaning for much. Death of all lives, yes! This woman,”--he shook his forefinger--”this woman now possesses evidence which can send Harry Brooke to the guillotine!” He looked at Dr. Fell. “Is it not so?”

“For you also,” assented Dr. Fell, “Whang in the gold.”

“In this brief-case,” continued Rigaud, his face swelling, “are the stones used to weigh it and Harry's raincoat stained with blood inside where his father has worn it. It would convince any court. It would show the truth.” He paused, considering. “Yet Fay Seton does not use this evidence.”

“Of course not,” said Barbara.

“Why do you say of course, mademoiselle?”

“Don't you see?” cried Barbara. “She'd got to a state of-of tiredness, of bitterness, where she could practically laugh? It didn't affect her any longer. She wasn't even interested in showing up Harry Brooke for what he was.

“She, the amateur harlot! He, the amateur murderer and hypocrite! Let's be indulgent to each other's foibles, and go our ways in a world where nothing will ever come right anyway. I—I don't want to sound silly, but that's how you really would feel about a situation like that.

“I thin,” said Barbara, “she told Harry Brooke. I think she told him she wasn't going to expose him unless the police arrested her. But, in case the police did arrest her, she was going to keep that brief-case with ts contents hidden away where nobody could find it.

“And she did keep the brief-case! That's it! She kept it for six long years! Sh brought I to England with her. It was always where she could find I. Bu she never had any reason to touch it, until . . . until . . .”

Barbara's voice trailed off.

Her yes looked suddenly and vaguely frightened, as though Barbara wondered whether her own imagination had carried her too far. For Dr. Fell, with wide-eyed and wheezing interest, was leaning forward in expectancy.

“Until--?” prompted Dr. Fell, in a hollow voice like wind along the Underground tunnel. “Archons of Athens! You're doing it! Don't stop there! Fay Seton never had any reason to touch the brief-case until . . .?”

But Miles Hammond hardly heard this. Sheer hatred welled up in his throat and choked him.

“So Harry Brooke,” Miles said, “Still got away with it?”

Barbara swung round from Dr. Fell. “How do you mean?”

“His father protected him,” Miles made a fierce gesture, “even when Harry bent over a dying man and mouthed out, 'Dad, who did this?' Now we learn that even Fay Seton protected him. “Steady, my boy! Steady!”

“The Harry Brookes of this world,” said Miles, “always get away with it. Whether it's luck, or circumstances, or some celestial gift in their own natures, I don't pretend to guess. That fellow ought to have gone to the guillotine, or spent the rest of his life on Devil's Island. Instead it's Fay Seton, who never did the least harm to anybody, who . . .” His voice rose up. “By God, I wish I could have met Harry Brooke six years ago! I'd give my soul to have a reckoning with him!”

“That's not difficult,” remarked Dr. Fell. “Would you like to have a reckoning with him now?”

An enormous crash of thunder, rolling in broken echoes over the roof-tops, flung ts noise into the room. Raindrops blew past Dr. Fell as he sat by the window: not quite so ruddy of countenance now, with his unlighted pipe in his hand.

Dr. Fell raised his voice.

“Are you out there, Hadley?” he shouted.

Barbara jumped away from the door; staring, she groped back to stand at the foot of the bed. Professor Rigaud used a French expletive not often heard in polite society.

And then everything seemed to happen at once.

As a rain-laden breeze came in at the windows, making the hanging lamp sway over the chest-of-drawers, some heavy weight thudded against the outside of the closed door to the passage. The knob twisted only slightly, but frantically, as though hands fought for it. Then the door banged open, rebounding against the wall. Three men, who were trying to keep their feet while fighting, lurched forward in a wrestling-group which almost toppled over when it banged against the tin box.

On one side was Superintendent Hadley, trying to grip somebody's wrists. On the other side was a uniformed police-inspector. In the middle . . .

“Professor Rigaud”--Dr. Fell's voice spoke clearly—“will you be good enough to identify that chap for us? The man in the middle?”

Miles Hammond looked for himself at the staring eyes, the corners of the mouth drawn back, the writhing legs that kicked out at his captors with vicious and sinewy strength. It was Miles who answered.

“Identify him?”

“Yes,” said Dr. Fell.

“Look here,” cried Miles, “what is all this? That's Steve Curtis, my sister's fiance! What are you trying to do?”

“We are trying,” thundered Dr. Fell, “to make an identification. And I think we have done it. For the man who calls himself Stephen Curtis is Harry Brooke.”

Chapter XX

Frederic, the head-waiter at Beltring's Restaurant—which is one of the few places in the West End where you can get food on a Sunday—was always glad to oblige Dr. Fell, even when Dr. Fell wanted a private room on short notice.

Frederic's manner froze to ice when he saw the doctor's three guests: Professor Rigaud, Mr. Hammond, and small fair-haired Miss Morell, the same three who had been at Beltring's two nights before.

But the guests did not seem happy either, especially at what Frederic considered a very tactful gesture on his part; for he ushered them into the same private dining-room as before, the room used by the Murder Club. He noticed that they seemed to eat rather from a sense of duty than any appreciation of the menu.

He did not se that their looks were even stranger afterwards, when they sat round the table.

“I will now,” groaned Professor Rigaud, “take my medicine. Continue.”

“Yes,” said Miles, without looking at Dr. Fell. “Continue.”

Barbara was silent.

“Look here!” protested Dr. Fell, making vast and vague gestures of distress which spilled ash from his pipe down his waistcoat. “Wouldn't you rather wait until . . .”

“No,” said Miles, and stared hard at a salt-cellar.

“Then I ask you,” said Dr. Fell, “to take your minds back to last nigh at Greywood, when Rigaud and I had arrived on Rigaud's romantic mission to warn you about vampirism.”

“I also wished,” observed the professor a trifle guiltily, “to have a look at Sr Charles Hammond's library. But in all the time I am at Greywood the one room I do not see is the library. Life is like that.”

Dr. Fell looked at Miles.

“You and Rigaud and I,” he pursued, “were in the sitting room, and you had just told me Fay Seton's own account of the Brook murder.

“Harry Brooke, I decided, was the murderer. But his motive? That was where I had the glimmer of a guess—based, I think, on your description of Fay's hysterical laughter when you asked if she had married Harry—that these anonymous letters, these slanderous reports, were a put-up job managed by the unpleasant Harry himself.

“Mind you! I never once suspected the reports were really true after all, until Fay Seton told me so herself in the hospital this evening. It made blazing sense of so much that was obscure; it completed the pattern, but I never suspected it.

“What I saw was an innocent woman traduced by the man who pretended to be in love with her. Suppose Howard Brooke found this out, from the mysterious letter Harry was writing on the afternoon of the murder? In that case the person we must find was the equally mysterious correspondent, Jim Morell.

“This hypothesis would explain why Harry killed his father. It would show Fay as innocent of everything except—for some reason of her own!--hiding the brief-case that was dropped into the river, and never denouncing Harry. In any case the charge of vampirism was nonsense. I was just announcing this to you when . . .

“We heard a revolver-shot upstairs. We found what had happened to your sister.

“And I didn't understand anything.

“However! Let me now put together certain points I saw for myself, certain information you gave me, and certain other information given by your sister Marion when she was able to make a statement before we left Greywood. Let me show you how the whole game was played out under your eyes.

“On Saturday afternoon, at four o'clock, you met your sister and 'Stephen Curtis' at Waterloo Station. In the tea-room you flung your hand-grenade (though of course you didn't know it at the time) by announcing you had engaged Fay Seton to come to Greywood. Is that correct?”

“Steve! Steve Curtis!” Resolutely Miles shut out of his mind the face that kept appearing between him and the candle-flames.

“Yes,” Miles agreed. “That's correct.”

“How did the alleged Stephen Curtis receive the news?”

“In the light of what we know now,” Miles replied dryly, “t would be a strong understatement to say he didn't like t. But he announced that he couldn't go back to Greywood with us that evening.”

“Had you known he couldn't go back to Greywood with you that evening?”

“No! Now you mention it, it surprised Marion as much as I did me. Steve began to talk rather hastily about a sudden crisis at the office.”

“Was the name of Professor Rigaud mentioned at any time? Was 'Curtis' aware you'd met Rigaud?”

Miles pressed a hand against his eyes, reconstructing the scene. H saw, in blurred colours which sharpened to such ugliness, “Steve” fiddling with his pipe and “Steve” putting on his hat and “Steve” somewhat shakily laughing.

“No!” Miles responded. “Come to think of it, he didn't even know I'd gone to a meeting of the Murder Club, or what the Murder Club was. I did say something about 'the professor,' but I'll swear I never mentioned Rigaud's name.”

Dr. Fell bent forward, with a pink-faced and terrifying benevolence.

“Fay Seton,” Dr. Fell said softly, “still held the evidence which could send Harry Brook to the guillotine. But,if Fay Seton was disposed of, there would apparently be nobody to connect 'Stephen Curtis' with Harry Brooke.”

Miles started to push back his chair.

“God Almighty!” he said. “You mean . . . ?”

“So-oftly!” urged Dr. Fell, waving a mesmeric hand before eyeglasses coming askew. “But here—oh, here!--is the point at which I want you to jog your memory. During that conversation, when you and your sister and the so-called Curtis were present, was anything said about rooms?”

“About rooms?”

“About bedrooms!” persisted Dr. Fell, with the air of a monster lurking in ambush. “About bedrooms! Eh?”

“Well, yes. Marion said she was going to put Fay in her bedroom, and move downstairs herself to a better ground-floor room we'd just been redecorating.”

“Ah!” said Dr. Fell, nodding several times. “It did seem to me I heard you talking at Greywood about the bedroom situation. So your sister wanted to put Fay Seton in her bedroom! Oh, ah! Yes! But she didn't do it?”

“No. She wanted to do it that evening, but Fay refused. Fay preferred the ground-floor room because of her heart. Fewer stairs to climb.”

Dr. Fell pointed with his pipe.

“But suppose,” he suggested, “you believe Fay Seton will be in the upstairs bedroom at the back of the house. Suppose, to make dead sure of this, you keep a watch on the house. You hide yourself among the trees at the rear of the house. You look up at a line of uncurtained windows. And, at some time before midnight, what do you see?

“You see Fay Seton—wearing nightgown and wrap—slowly walking back and forth in front of those windows.

“Marion Hammond can't be seen at all. Marion is sitting in a chair over at the other side of the room, by the bedside table. She can't even be seen through the side of eastern windows, because they're curtained. But Fay Seton can be seen.

“And further suppose, in the black early hours of the morning, you creep into that dark bedroom intent on a neat and artistic murder. You are going to kill someone asleep in that bed. And, as you approach, you catch a very faint whiff of perfume; a distinctive perfume always associated with Fay Seton.

“You can't know, of course, that Fay has made the present of a little bottle of this perfume to Marion Hammond. The perfume bottle stands now on the bedside table. But you can't know that. You can only breathe the scent of that perfume. Is there any doubt in your mind now?”

Miles had sen it coming, seen it coming ever since Dr. Fell's first remark. But now the image seemed to rush out at him.

“Yes!” said Dr. Fell with emphasis. “Harry Brooke, alias Stephen Curtis, planned a skilful murder. And he got the wrong woman.”

There was silence.

“However!” added Dr. Fell, sweeping out his arm in a gesture which sent a coffee cup flying across the little dining-room, but which nobody noticed. “However! I am again indulging in my deplorable habit of anticipating the evidence.

“Last night, let it be admitted, I was royally stumped. With regard to the Brooke murder, I believed Harry had done the deed. I believed Fay Seton had afterwards got the brief-case with its damning raincoat, and still had it; in fact, I hinted as much to her with a question about underwater swimming. But nothing seemed to explain this mysterious attack on Marion Hammond.

“Even an incident on the following morning did not quite unseal these eyes. It was the first time I ever saw 'Mr. Stephen Curtis.'

“He had returned, very brisk and jaunty, apparently from London. He strolled into the sitting-room while you”--Dr. Fell again looked very hard at Miles—“were speaking on the 'phone to Miss Morell. Do you remember?”

“Yes,” said Miles.

“I remember the conversation,” said Barbara. “But . . .”

“As for myself,” rumbled Dr. Fell, “I was just behind him, carrying a cup of tea on a tray.” Dr. Fell furrowed up his face with intense concentration. “Your words to Miss Morell, in 'Stephen Curtis's' hearing, were (harrumph) almost exactly as follows:

“'There was a very bad business here last night,' you said to Miss Morell. 'Something happened in my sister's room that seems past human belief.' You broke off at the beginning of another sentence as 'Stephen Curtis' came in.

“Instantly you got up to reassure him in a fever of care that he shouldn't worry. 'It's all right,' you sad to him; Marion's had a very bad time of it, but she's going to get well.' You recall that part of it too?”

Very clearly Miles could se “Steve” standing there, in his neat grey suit, with the rolled-up umbrella over his arm. Again he saw the colour slowly draining out of “Steve's” face.

“I couldn't see his face,”--it was as though Dr. Fell, uncannily, were answering Miles' thoughts—“but I heard this gentleman's voice go up a couple of octaves when he said 'Marion?' Just like that!

“Sir, I tell you this: if my wits worked better in the morning (as they do not) that one word would have given the whole show away. 'Curtis' was completely thunderstruck. But why should he have been? He had just heard you announce that something very bad had occurred in your sister's room.

“Suppose I return home, and hear someone saying over the telephone that something very bad has occurred in my wife's room? Don't I naturally assume that the accident, or whatever it is, has occurred to my wife? Am I bowled over with utter astonishment when I hear that the victim is my wife, and not my Aunt Martha from Hackney Wick?

“That tore it.

“Unfortunately, I failed at the moment to see.

“But do you remember what he did immediately afterwards? He deliberately lifted his umbrella, and very coolly and deliberately smashed it to flinders across the edge of the table. 'Stephen Curtis' is supposed to be—he pretends to be—a stolid kind of person. But that was Harry Brooke hitting the tennis-ball. That was Harry Brooke not getting what he wanted.”

Miles Hammond stared at memory.

“Steve's” personable face: Harry Brooke's face. The fair hair: Harry Brooke's hair. Harry, Miles reflected, hadn't gone prematurely grey from nerves, as Professor Rigaud said he would; he had lost the hair, and it was for some reason grotesque to think of Harry Brooke as nearly bald.

That was why they thought of him as older, of course, “Steve” might have been in his late thirties. But they had never heard his age.

They: meaning himself and Marion . . .

Miles was roused by Dr. Fell's voice.

“This gentleman,” the doctor went on grimly, “saw his scheme dished. Fay Seton was alive; she was there in the house. And you gave him, unintentionally, almost as bad a shock a moment afterwards. You told him that another person who knew him as Harry Brook, Professor Rigaud, was at Greywood; and was, in fact, upstairs asleep in 'Curtis's' own room.

“Do you wonder he turned away and went over towards the bookshelves to hide his face?

“Disaster lurked ahead of every step he took now. He had tried to kill Fay Seton, and nearly killed Marion Hammond instead. With that plan gone . . .”

“Dr. Fell!” said Barbara softly.

“Hey?” rumbled Dr. Fell, drawn out of obscure meditation. “Oh, ah! Miss Morell! What is it?”

“I know I'm an outsider.” Barbara ran her finger along the edge of the tablecloth. “I have no real concern in this, except as one who wants to help and can't. But”--the grey eyes lifted pleadingly—“but please, please, before poor Miles goes crazy and maybe the rest of us as well, will you tell us what this man did that frightened Marion so much?”

“Ah!” said Dr. Fell.

“Harry Brooke,” said Barbara, “is a poisonous worm. But he's not clever. Where did he get the idea for what you call an 'artistic' murder?”

“Mademoiselle,” said Professor Rigaud, with an air of powerful gloom like Napoleon at St. Helena, “he got it from ME. And I have received it from an incident in the life of Count Cagliostro.”

“Of course!” breathed Barbara.

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

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

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

“Why impossible?” asked Dr. Fell.

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

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

Miles and Barbara stared at each other.

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

“Oh, yes.”

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

“Oh, no,” answered Dr. Fell.

Barbara put a soothing hand gently on Miles' arm.

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

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

“Odd as I may sound, you are.”

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

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

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

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

“So let us see!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whack!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Harrumph, ha!” said Dr. Fell.

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

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

“But in that case . . .

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

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

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

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

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

“Oh Lord! Oh Bacchus!

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

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

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

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

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

Miles Hammond intervened.

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

Dr. Fell nodded.

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

“Yes. That's right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miles broke off in realization. Dr. Fell nodded.

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

“She knew. By thunder, she knew!

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

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

Dr. Fell coughed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And so—look out!

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

“But Fay Seton, returning alone to a solitary forest place, with hanging evidence?

“That was why, my dear Hammond, I sent you after her in such haste and instructed you to stay with her. Afterwards things went all wrong.”

“Ha!” said Professor Rigaud, snorting and rapping on the table to call for attention.

“This jolly farceur,” continued Rigaud, “dashes into my bedroom where I am asleep, hauls me from bed, hauls me to the window, and says, 'Look!' I look out, and I see two persons leaving the house. 'That's Mr. Hammond,' says he; 'but quick, quick, quick, who is the other man?' 'My God,' I say, 'either I am dreaming or it is Harry Brooke.' And he plunges away for the telephone.”

Dr. Fell grunted.

“What I hadn't remembered,” Dr. Fell explained, “is that Hammond had read the woman's note aloud, in ringing tones which carried to a half-crazed man at the foot of the back stairs. And,” added Dr. Fell, turning to Miles, “he went along with you in the car to the station. Didn't he?”

“Yes! But he didn't get aboard the train.”

“Oh, yes, he did,” said Dr. Fell. “By the simple process of jumping in after you did. You never noticed him, never thought of him, because you were searching so feverishly for a woman. When you searched that train, any man, if he kept a newspaper in front of his face as so many were doing, would never get a second glance.

“You failed o find Fay Seton either, for which you must blame you own overwrought state of mind. There was nothing in the least mysterious about it. She was in a state of mind even less receptive to crowds than yours; she did what many people do nowadays if they are good-looking women and can get away with it; she travelled in the guard's van.

“That is a foolish episode leading to a last tragic episode.

“Fay went to London in a blank hysteria of rage and despair. She was going to end all this. She was going to tell the truth about everything. But then, when Superintendent Hadley was actually in her room urging her to speak . . .”

“Yes?” prompted Barbara.

“She still found she couldn't do it,” said Dr. Fell.

“You mean she was still in love with Harry Brooke?”

“Oh, no,” said Dr. Fell. “That was all past and gone. That had been only a momentary idea of respectability. No: it was a part, now, of the same evil destiny that kept hounding her whatever she did. You see, Harry Brooke who became metamorphosed into Stephen Curtis . . .”

Professor Rigaud waved his hands.

“But his,” he interrupted, “is another thing I do not understand. How did that change come about? When and how did Harry Brooke become Stephen Curtis?”

“Sir,” replied Dr. Fell, “above all things my spirit is wearied by the routine card-indexing necessary to check up on a person's papers. Since you have formally identified the man as Harry Brooke, I leave the rest to Hadley. But I believe”--he looked at Miles—“you haven't known 'Curtis' for a very long time?”

“No; only for a couple of years.”

“And according to your sister, he was invalided out of the Forces comparatively early in the war?”

“Yes. In the summer of nineteen-forty.”

“My own guess,” said Dr. Fell, “is that Harry Brooke in France at the outbreak of the war couldn't endure the threat constantly hanging over him. It wore his temperament to constantly hanging over him. It wore his temperament to shreds. He couldn't stand the idea of Fay Seton with evidence that would . . . well, think of the cold morning at dawn and the blade of the guillotine looming in front of you.

“So he decided to do what many other men have done before him: to cut free, and make a new life for himself. After all, the Germans were over-running France; in his opinion, for good; his father's money, his father's goods were lost to him in any case. In my opinion, there was a real Stephen Curtis who died in the retreat of Dunkirk. And Harry Brooke, in the French Army, was attached to the British as interpreter. In the chaos of that time, I think he assumed the clothes and papers and identity of the real Stephen Curtis.

“IN England he built up this identity. He was six years older, a dozen years older as we count time in war, than the boy who thought he wanted to be a painter. He had a reasonably solid position. He was comfortably engaged to a girl who had come into money, and who managed him as in his heart he always wanted to be managed . . .”

“It's odd you should say that,” Miles muttered. “Marion commented on exactly the same thing.”

“This was the position when Fay appeared to wreck him. The poor fellow didn't really want to kill her, you know.” Dr. Fell blinked at Miles. “Do you remember what he asked you, in the tea-room at Waterloo, after he'd got over the first nauseating shock?”

“Stop a bit!” said Miles. “He asked me how long it would take Fay to catalogue the books in the library. You mean . . .?”

“If it had taken only a week or so, as he suggested, he might have found some excuse for keeping out of her way. But you swept that away by saying it would take months. So the decision was made like that.” Dr. Fell snapped his fingers. “Fay could destroy his new position, even if she didn't denounce him as his father's murderer. And so, remembering the suggestion from the life of Cagliostro . . .”

“I will clear my character of this,” said Professor Rigaud in a frenzy. “I once told him, yes, that a person with a weak heart might be frightened to death like that. But the detail of neatly placing the revolver in the victim's hand, so it will be believed she has fired the shot itself: that I do not think of. That is criminal genius!”

“I quite agree,” said Dr. Fell. “And I sincerely trust no one else will imitate him. You create a murder in which the victim appears to have frightened herself to death, at the sight of some intruder who was never there.”

Professor Rigaud was still in a frenzy.

“Not only was this not my intention,” he declared, “but—how I hate crime, myself!--with this added detail I do not even recognize the trick when I see it played in front of me.” He paused, drew a handkerchief from his pocket, and mopped his forehead.

“Had Harry Brooke,” he added, “any other such ingenious plan in his head when he followed Fay Seton to London this afternoon?”

“No, said Dr. Fell. “He was merely going to kill her and destroy all the evidence. I shiver to think what might have happened if he had got to Bolsover Place before Hammond and Miss Morell. But 'Curtis' was following them, do you see? With Fay Seton in the guard's van, he couldn't find her either. So he had to follow them if he wanted to be led to her.

“Then Hadley arrived. And 'Curtis,' who could hear everything from the passage outside the room in Bolsover Place, lost his head. His only idea was to get that raincoat—the blood-stained raincoat, the one thing utterly damning o him—before Fay broke down and exposed him.

“He threw the main electric switch in the fuse-box outside in the passage. He got away in the dark with the brief-case, and dropped it in flight because he was clinging so hard to the raincoat still weighted with heavy stones. He ran straight out of that house into . . .”

“Into what?” demanded Miles.

“A policeman,” said Dr. Fell. “You may remember that Hadley didn't even bother to chase him? Hadley merely opened the window and blew a police whistle. We'd arranged matters over the telephone to be prepared if anything like that happened.

“Harry Brooke, alias Stephen Curtis, was kept at the police station in Camden High Street until Rigaud and I arrived back from Hampshire. Then he was brought round to Bolsover Place for formal identification by Rigaud. I told you, my dear Hammond, that Hadley's task wouldn't be pleasant for one of you three; and I meant you. But it leads me to the one word want to say at the end.”

Dr. Fell sat back in his chair. He picked up his meerschaum pipe, dead with white ash, and put it down again. A vast discomfort or something like it made him puff out his cheeks.

“Sir,” he began in a thunderous voice, which he managed to tone down. “I do not think you need worry unduly about your sister Marion. Unchivalrous as it may sound, I say to you that this young lady is as tough as nails. She will suffer very little harm from the loss of Stephen Curtis. But Fay Seton is another matter.”

The little dining-room was silent. They could hear the rain outside.

“I have told you all her story now,” pursued Dr. Fell, “or nearly all of it. I should say no more, since the matter is none of my business. And yet these past six years cannot have been a very easy time for her.

“She was hounded from Chartres. She was hounded, with a threat of arrest for murder, even in Paris. I am inclined to suspect, since she wouldn't show her French identity papers to Hadley, that she made her living on the streets.

“Yet there was some quality in that girl's nature—call it generosity, call it a sense of fatality, call it anything you like—that would not let her speak out, even at the end, and denounce a person who had once been her friend. She feels that an evil destiny has got her and will never let her go. She has at best only a few months more to live. She lies now in a hospital, sick and dispirited and without hope. What do you think of it all?”

Miles rose to his feet.

“I'm going to her,” he said.

There was a sharp scraping noise on the carpet as Barbara Morell pushed her chair back. Barbara's eyes were opened wide.

“Miles, don't be a fool!”

“I'm going to her.”

Then it all poured out.

“Listen,” said Barbara, resting her hands on the table and speaking quietly but very fast. “You're not in love with her. I knew that when you told me about Pamela Hoyt and the dream you had. She's just the same as Pamela Hoyt; unreal, a dust-image out of old books, a dream you've created in your own mind.

“Listen, Miles! That's what threw the spell over you. You're an idealist and you've never been anything else. Whatever—whatever mad plan you've got in your head, it could only end in disaster even before she died. Miles, for heaven's sake!”

He went over to the chair where he had left his hat.

Barbara Morell—sincere, sympathetic, advising him for his own good as Marion did—let her voice rise to a small scream.

“Miles, it's silly! Think what she is!”

“I don't gibe a curse what she is,” he said. “I'm going to her.”

And once more Miles Hammond went out of the little dining-room at Beltring's, and hurried down the private stairs into the rain.