He Who Whispers (19 page)

But, in actual fact, he wasn't feeling philosophical.

After a first quick journey he was apprehensive. After a second he was panicky. After a third …

For Fay Seton was not aboard the train.

Steady now! Don't get the wind up
!

Fay's got to be here!

But she wasn't.

Miles stood in a corridor midway along the length of the train, gripping the window-railing and trying to keep calm. The afternoon had grown warmer and darker, in black smoky clouds that seemed to mix with the smoke of the train. Miles stared out of the window until the moving landscape blurred. He was seeing Dr Fell's frightened face, and hearing Dr Fell's voice.

That ‘explanation', delivered by the doctor in a vacant undertone while engaged in cramming biscuits into Miles's pockets to take the place of breakfast, had not been very coherent.

‘Find her and stay with her! Find her and stay with her!' That had been the burden of it. ‘If she insists on coming back to Greywood to-night, that's all right – in fact, it's probably the best thing – but stay with her and don't leave her side for a minute!'

‘Is she in danger?'

‘In my opinion, yes,' said Dr Fell. ‘And if you want to see her proved innocent of' – he hesitated – ‘of at least the worst charge against her, for the love of heaven don't fail me!'

The worst charge against her?

Miles shook his head. The jerk of the train swayed and roused him. Fay had either missed the train – which seemed incredible, unless the bus had broken down – or, more probably, she had turned back after all.

And here he was speeding away in the opposite direction, away from whatever might be happening. But … hold on! here was a hopeful point! … the ‘something damnable' Dr Fell had predicted seemed to concern what would occur if Fay
went to London
and returned to carry out her plans. That meant there was nothing to worry about. Or did it?

Miles could never remember a longer journey. The train was an express; he couldn't have got out to turn back if he had wanted to. Rain-whips stung the windows. Miles got entangled with a family party which overflowed from compartment into corridor like a camp-fire group, and remembered that its sandwiches were in a suitcase under a mountainous pile of somebody else's luggage, and for a time created the general wild aspect of moving-day. It was twenty minutes to four when the train drew in at Waterloo.

Waiting for him, just outside the barrier, stood Barbara Morrell.

The sheer pleasure he felt at seeing her momentarily drove out his anxieties. Round them the clacking torrent from the train poured through the barrier. From the station loud-speaker, a refined voice hollowly enunciated.

‘Hello,' said Barbara.

She seemed more aloof than he remembered her.

‘Hello,' said Miles. ‘I – er – hardly liked to drag you over here to the station.'

‘Oh, that's all right,' said Barbara. He well remembered, now, the grey eyes with their long black lashes. ‘Besides, I have to be at the office later this evening.'

‘At the office? On Sunday night?'

‘I'm in Fleet Street,' said Barbara. ‘I'm a journalist. That's why I said I didn't “exactly” write fiction.' She brushed this away. The grey eyes studied him furtively. ‘What's wrong?' she asked suddenly. ‘What is it? You look …'

‘There's the devil and all to pay,' Miles burst out. He felt somehow that he could let himself go in front of this girl. ‘I was supposed to find Fay Seton at any cost. Everything depended on it. We all thought she'd be in this train. Now I don't know what in blazes to do, because she wasn't in the train after all.'

‘Wasn't in the train?' Barbara repeated. Her eyes opened wide. ‘But Fay Seton
was
in the train! She walked through that barrier not twenty seconds before you did!'

‘Will pass-en-gers for Hon-i-ton,'
sang the dictatorial loud-speaker,
‘join the queue outside Platform Num-ber Nine! Will pass-en-gers for Hon-i-ton …'

It blattered above every other noise in the station. And yet the realm of nightmare had returned.

‘You must have been seeing things!' said Miles. ‘I tell you she wasn't aboard that train!' He looked round wildly as a new thought occurred to him. ‘Stop a bit! So you do know her after all?'

‘No! I'd never set eyes on her before in my life!'

‘Then how do you know it was Fay Seton?'

‘From the photograph. The coloured photograph Professor Rigaud showed us on Friday night. After all, I … I thought she was with you. And so I wasn't going to keep the appointment. Or at least – I didn't quite know. What's
wrong?'

This was disaster fine and full.

He wasn't mad, Miles told himself; and he wasn't drunk, and he wasn't blind; and he could take his oath Fay Seton had not been aboard that train. Fantastic images occurred to him, of a white face and a red mouth. These images were exotic plants which withered in the atmosphere of Waterloo Station, certainly in the atmosphere of the train he had just left.

Yet he looked down at Barbara's fair hair and grey eyes; he thought of her normalness – that was it! a lovable normalness – in this murky affair; and at the same time he thought of all that had happened since he saw her last.

Marion
was
lying in a stupor at Greywood, and not from the effects of poison or a knife. Dr Fell
had
spoken of an evil spirit. These things were not fancies; they were facts. Miles remembered his impression of that morning: here's a malignant force, and Dr Fell knows what it is; we'll kill it, or it will kill us; and, in sober God's truth, the game had begun now.

All this went through his head in the split-second of Barbara's remark.

‘You saw Fay Seton come through the gates,' he said. ‘In which direction did she go?'

‘I couldn't tell. There are too many people.'

‘Wait a minute! We're not beaten yet! Professor Rigaud told me last night … yes, he's at Greywood too! … that you phoned him yesterday, and that you knew Fay's address. She's got a room in town somewhere, and according to Dr Fell she'll go straight to it.
Do
you know the address?'

‘Yes!' Barbara, in a tailored suit and white blouse, with a mackintosh draped over her shoulders and an umbrella hung across her arm, fumblingly opened her handbag and took out an address-book. ‘This is it. Five Bolsover Place, NW
I
. But …!'

‘Where's Bolsover Place?'

‘Well, Bolsover Street is off Camden High Street in Camden Town. I – I looked it up when I wondered whether I ought to go and see her. It's rather a dingy neighbourhood, but I imagine she's even more hard up than the rest of us.'

‘What's her quickest way to get there?'

‘By Underground, easily. You can go straight through from here without a change.'

‘Then that's what she's done, you can bet a fiver! She can't be two minutes ahead of us! Probably we can catch her! Come on!'

Give me some luck! he was praying under his breath. Give me just one proper hand to play, one card higher than a deuce or a three! And not long afterwards, when they burst out of a ticket-queue and penetrated down into the airless depths where a maze of lines join, he got his card.

Miles heard the rumble of the approaching train as they emerged on the platform of the Northern Line. They were at one end of the platform, and people straggled for more than a hundred yards along its curve. Vision was blurred in this half-cylinder cavern, once brave with white tiling, now sordid and ill-lighted.

The red train swept out of its tunnel in a gale of wind, and streamed past to a stop. And he saw Fay Seton.

He saw her by the bright flash of windows now unscaled from blast-netting. She was standing at the extreme other end of the platform, the front of the train; and she moved forward as the doors rolled open.

‘Fay!' he yelled.
‘Fay!'

It went completely unheard.

‘Edgware train!' the guard was bellowing. ‘Edgware train!'

‘Don't try to run up there!' warned Barbara. ‘The doors will close and we'll lose her altogether. Hadn't we better go in here?'

They dived into the rear car of the train, a non-smoker, just before the doors did close. Its only other occupants were a policeman, a somnolent-looking Australian soldier, and the guard at his panel of control-buttons. Miles had got only a faint glimpse of Fay's face; but it had looked fierce, preoccupied, with that same curious smile of last night.

It was maddening to be so close to her, and yet …

‘If I can get through to the front of the train –!'

‘Please!' urged Barbara. She indicated the sign, ‘Do Not Pass From One Car To Another Whilst the Train is In Motion'; she indicated the guard, and she indicated the policeman. ‘It wouldn't do much good, would it, if you got yourself arrested now?'

‘No, I suppose not.'

‘She'll get out at Camden Town. So will we. Sit down here.'

In their ears was a soft, streaming thunder as the train rocketed through the tunnel. The car swayed and creaked round a curve; lights behind opaque glass jolted on the upholstery of the seats. Miles, all his nerves twitching with doubt, sank down beside Barbara on a double-seat facing forward.

‘I don't like to ask too many questions,' continued Barbara, ‘but I've been half mad with curiosity ever since I talked to you on the phone. What is all the urgency about overtaking Fay Seton?'

The train ground to a stop, and the sliding doors rolled open.

‘Charing Cross!'
yelled the guard conscientiously. ‘
Edgware train
!'

Miles sprang to his feet.

‘Really it's all right,' Barbara pleaded. ‘If Dr Fell says she's going to that place of hers, she's bound to get out at Camden Town. What can happen in the meantime?'

‘I don't know,' admitted Miles. ‘Look here,' he added, sitting down again and taking her hand in both of his. ‘I've known you only a very short time; but do you mind me saying I'd rather talk to you now than almost anyone else I can think of?'

‘No,' answered Barbara, looking away from him, ‘I don't mind.'

‘I can't say how you've been spending the week-end,' pursued Miles, ‘but we've been having nothing but a Grand Guignol of vampires and near-murders, and …'

‘What did you Say?'
She drew back her hand quickly.

‘Yes! And Dr Fell claims you may be able to supply one of the most important pieces of information, whatever that is.' He paused. ‘Who is Jim Morell?'

Clank-thud
went the rush of the train, hollow-streaming through its tunnel; a breeze touched their hair from the ventilator-windows.

‘You can't connect him with this,' said Barbara, and her fingers tightened round her handbag. ‘He doesn't know, he never did know, anything about the death of Mr Brooke! He …'

‘Yes! But do you mind telling me who he is?'

‘He's my brother.' Barbara moistened her very smooth, pink lips; not as attractive, perhaps, not as heady, as those of the passive blue-eyed woman now in the first car of the train. Miles shook this thought out of his mind as Barbara asked quickly: ‘Where did you hear about him?'

‘From Fay Seton.'

‘Oh?' She started a little.

‘I'll tell you the whole story in just a minute. But there are certain things to straighten out first. Your brother … where is he now?'

‘He's in Canada. For three years he was a prisoner of war in Germany, and we thought he was dead. He's been sent out to Canada for his health. Jim's older than I am; he was quite a well-known painter, before the war.'

‘And I understand he was a friend of Harry Brooke.'

‘Yes.' Then Barbara spoke, softly but very clearly. ‘He was a friend of that utterly unspeakable swine Harry Brooke.'

‘Strand!'
shouted out the guard.
‘Edgware train!'

Subconsciously Miles was listening hard for that voice; listening for every slowing-down of the rumbling wheels, every sigh and jolt as the doors rolled open. The one thing he mustn't miss, on his soul's life, were those words, ‘Camden Town'.

But – utterly unspeakable swine? Harry Brooke?

‘There's just one thing,' continued Miles, with discomfort stirring through him but with a fierce determination to face it. ‘I'd better mention before I tell you what happened. And that's this:

‘I believe in Fay Seton. I've got into trouble with practically everyone for saying that: with my sister Marion, with Steve Curtis, with Professor Rigaud, even perhaps with Dr Fell, though I'm not quite so sure where he stands. And, since you were the first person who warned me against her …'

‘I warned you against her?'

‘Yes. Didn't you?'

‘Oh!' breathed Barbara Morell.

She had drawn back a little from him, with the dark cylinder-curved walls flying past outside the windows. She breathed that monosyllable in a tone of utter stupefaction, as though she could not believe her ears.

Miles had an instinct that the whole situation was going to change again; that something was not only wrong, but deadly wrong. Barbara stared at him, her mouth open. He saw comprehension come into the grey eyes, slow incredulous comprehension as they searched his face; then half-laughter, a wild helpless gesture …

‘You thought,' she insisted, ‘that I –?'

‘Yes! Didn't you?'

‘Listen.' Barbara put her hand on his arm, and spoke with clear-eyed sincerity. ‘I wasn't trying to warn you against her. I was wondering if you could
help
her. Fay Seton is …'

‘Go on!'

‘Fay Seton is one of the most completely wronged, bedevilled, and – and
hurt
persons I've ever heard of. All I was trying to find out was whether she might have committed the murder, because I didn't know any details about the murder. She'd have been justified, you know, if she
had
killed someone! But you could tell, from what Professor Rigaud said, she hadn't done that, either. And I was at my wits' end.'