He Who Whispers by John Dickson Carr Page A

really. Is there anything you want to ask me?’
    Acutely uncomfortable, Miles spread out his hands. ‘My dear Miss Seton! I’m not here to question you like a public prosecutor!’
    â€˜Perhaps not. But I’d rather you did, if you have any doubts.’
    Miles hesitated.
    â€˜The only thing the police really could urge against me,’ she said, ‘was that most unfortunate swim of mine. I had been in the river. And there were no witnesses who could testify about the part of the tower facing the river: who went near it, or who didn’t. Of course it was perfectly absurd that someone – in a bathing-dress: really! – could get up a smooth wall forty feet high. They were compelled to see that, eventually. But in the meantime …!’
    Smiling as though the matter were of no importance now, yet shivering a little nevertheless, Fay rose to her feet. She edged forward among the waist-high piles of books, as though impulsively, before changing her mind. Her head was still a little on one side. About her eyes and her mouth there was a passive gentleness, a sweetness, which went straight to Miles’s heart. He jumped down from the edge of the window-sill.
    â€˜You do believe me?’ cried Fay. ‘Say you believe me!’

CHAPTER 8
    M ILES smiled at her.
    â€˜Of course I’ believe you!’
    â€˜Thank you, Mr Hammond. Only I thought you looked a little doubtful, a little – what shall I call it?’
    â€˜It isn’t that. It’s only that Professor Rigaud’s account was more or less cut off in the middle, and there were certain things that kept tormenting me. What was the official police view of the whole matter?’
    â€˜They finally decided it was suicide.’
    â€˜ Suicide ?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜But why?’
    â€˜I suppose, really,’ and Fay lifted her thin-arched eyebrows in a timidly whimsical way, ‘it was because they couldn’t find any other explanation. That verdict saved their faces.’ She hesitated. ‘And it’s true that Mr Brooke’s fingerprints, and only Mr Brooke’s fingerprints, were on the handle of the sword-stick. You heard it was a sword-stick?’
    â€˜Oh, yes. I even saw the infernal thing.’
    â€˜The police surgeon, a nice funny little man named Doctor Pommard, almost had a fit whenever he thought of the verdict. He gave some technicalities, which I’m afraid I don’t understand, to show that the angle of the wound was very nearly impossible for a suicide: certainly impossible unless Mr Brooke had held the weapon by the blade instead of by the handle. All the same …’ She lifted her shoulders.
    â€˜But wait a minute!’ protested Miles. ‘As I understand it, the brief-case with the money was missing?’
    â€˜Yes. That’s true.’
    â€˜If nobody got up on top of the tower to stab Mr Brooke, what did they think had happened to the brief-case?’
    Fay looked away from him.
    â€˜They thought,’ she replied, ‘that in Mr Brooke’s dying convulsion he – he had somehow knocked it off the parapet into the river.’
    â€˜Did they drag the river?’
    â€˜Yes. Immediately.’
    â€˜And they didn’t find it?’
    â€˜Not then … or ever.’
    Fay’s head was bent forward, her eyes on the floor.
    â€˜And it wasn’t for want of trying!’ she cried out softly. The tips of her fingers brushed across books and left streaks in the dust. ‘That affair was the sensation of France during the first winter of the war. Poor Mrs Brooke died during that winter; they say she died of grief. Harry, as I told you, was killed in the retreat to Dunkirk.
    â€˜Then the Germans came. They were always glad of any excuse to give publicity to a sensational murder case, especially one that had – that had a woman’s immorality concerned in it, because they believed it kept the French public