The Whisper in the Gloom

  “Well, of course. But—” There was a puzzled look in Lady Durbar’s liquid blue eyes. “I mean, do you do it for a sort of hobby?”

  “Oh no. I get paid.”

  “How much?” asked Clare, and the others broke into laughter.

  The talk turned to the visit of the Soviet delegation. Sir Rudolf again proved himself an exceptionally well-informed man. He had friends in high place, from whom he had gathered much—perhaps rather too much—about the scope and course of the negotiations. He talked knowledgeably, incisively, and, for a man to whom communism must represent everything he held least sacred, dispassionately. He summed up shrewdly the personalities of those who were leading the discussions, though beneath the surface there was a faint undertone of brusqueness, contempt almost—the attitude of the business mogul toward politicians who pretend to be directing the world’s affairs but are themselves pawns in the hands of a higher power. One inferred that this higher power was history, operating through the almighty dollar. Sir Rudolf and Lady Hesione, it came out, were going to a reception this evening at which the Russian Minister would be present.

  “Yes,” she gaily said, “you could have knocked me down with a feather when Rudie accepted. It’s like the Archbishop of Canterbury gracing a garden party at a brothel.”

  “Oh, do they have garden parties?” asked Clare.

  Sir Rudolf was not amused. His heavy, bronze-brown face flushed darker, and he said to his wife, “Don’t be a fool, my dear.” Then, less brusquely, “You don’t understand these things. One can’t always choose one’s company.”

  “Rudie has a Watch-Committee streak,” she said, after a slight pause, to her guests. “He still finds me rather shocking sometimes. But he likes it really—don’t you, my pet?”

  “I suppose,” said Nigel presently, “that any successful moves toward world peace—a plan for progressive disarmament, for instance—are bound to create new economic problems.”

  Sir Rudolf gave him a heavy-lidded, skeptical look, but said nothing. Nigel went on, “Look how the steel and nickel markets slumped last year, just at a breath of a possibility of better international relations.”

  His host bit the end off a cigar, then sighted it at Nigel. “You study the markets?”

  “I notice they’re as sensitive as prima donnas.”

  Sir Rudolf gave a couple of noncommittal grunts, applying his cigar to a massive table lighter.

  “And,” Nigel continued, “particularly, just now, at the idea of peace. You only have to mention it, and they go off into a swoon. I suppose that’s why the newspapers insulate the world ‘peace’ with quotation marks—to prevent the poor dear markets getting a shock.”

  “The poor, dear financiers, you mean?”

  Nigel shrugged. “Disarmament would hit some of them pretty hard, I imagine.”

  Sir Rudolf gave him a cursory look, which seemed to measure him and throw him back into the water.

  “The work ‘peace’ is insulated, as you put it, because all these so-called ‘peace movements’ are a fraud—Communist-inspired—to weaken moral resistance and political co-operation in the West.”

  “All of them? Including the P.M.’s invitation to these discussions that are going on now?”

  “Oh, that’s quite different. Nobody in his senses could object to them.”

  “Then there must be a lot of people out of their senses.”

  Sir Rudolf was glowering at him. “I don’t understand you.”

  “All these incidents that have been taking place. They’re obviously organized, don’t you think?”

  “I dare say. Organized by a few crackpots. They mean precisely nothing.” Sir Rudolf dismissed the crackpots with a wave of his cigar, and rose from the table.

  In the drawing room Lady Durbar, beckoning Nigel to a sofa beside her, turned upon him the full voltage of her deep blue eyes.

  “What about it?” she asked. “Will you come and find these burglars for me?”

  “But, you know, the police are infinitely better equipped for that sort of thing.”

  “Even when it’s what they call an inside job?”

  “Do you think it is?” he asked, after a little pause.

  Her eyes glanced aside from Nigel. He noticed the handkerchief, balled tight in her left hand, and a delicious waft of perfume. “I just don’t know,” she helplessly murmured. Then, lower still, as if to herself, “I don’t mind losing the jewels, if I don’t also have to lose my faith in—” Her voice trailed away altogether.

  “Your faith?” Nigel prompted. “You do suspect somebody? Well, it’d be better to know, one way or another, than to go on worrying, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she repeated childishly, “I want to know. I simply must know.”

  “Well then—”

  “But I’m not—I can’t go sicking it all up to the police.” Her voice had become rich and vibrant again, and there was the faintest stress on the last word.

  “What are you two conspiring about?” asked Sir Rudolf from the other side of the room.

  “I’m trying to interest Mr. Strangeways in a valuable robbery.”

  “And is he interested?”

  Nigel smoothed back the tow-colored hair from his forehead, looking worried. “I am. But I’ve got a rather fulltime job on my hands just now.”

  “Oh, do tell us about it,” said Hesione. “Or must it be a secret?”

  “I’m looking for a boy.”

  “Has he been kidnaped or something?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How very sinister this sounds!”

  “Do you mean that boy Foxy?” asked Clare.

  “No. It’s a boy who has come into possession of some knowledge which might lead the police to a murderer.”

  Nigel paused. His audience were all attention.

  “Oh, poor little boy,” exclaimed Hesione.

  “Has he disappeared, then?” her husband asked.

  “Not exactly. But it’s difficult, trying to find one boy among the whole population of London.”

  Sir Rudolf leaned forward. “You mean, I take it, that you’re the only person who could identify this boy?”

  “The only person on the side of the Law, yes. There’s a couple of thugs after him too, who know what he looks like.” Nigel proceded to tell them, with certain reservations, the story of the boy he had rescued in Kensington Gardens. When he had finished, Sir Rudolf slapped his knee.

  “That must be the murder you read out to me in the paper the other day, Hess. What was the fellow’s name? Williams. Dai Williams. But I thought they knew now who’d done it, Strangeways. They published a description of a fellow they want to interview, didn’t they, yesterday?”

  “Well, this message the boy received—the police think it may be the key to—to a very considerable conspiracy which they’ve got wind of.”

  “Why don’t they advertise for the boy, then?”

  “Afraid it might lead to his being bumped off, I suppose.”

  Clare’s eyes, dark velvety as pansies, were regarding Nigel strangely. “And what about you?” she said. “This is all absurdly melodramatic; but I should have thought you were in danger yourself.”

  “I expect I am,” Nigel equably answered.

  At this point, the secretary came in to say that Sir Rudolf was wanted on the telephone.

  “Oh, it’s Marchbanks, is it? I’d better talk to him. Will you excuse me a few minutes?”

  When Sir Rudolf returned, Nigel and Clare got up to say good-by. But their host pressed them to stay a little and look at some of his pictures. He would send Clare back in his car, so that she could resume work on schedule. They refused this offer, Nigel saying he would escort Miss Massinger home after they had inspected the pictures. These, in a long gallery on the first floor, proved rewarding enough, though none was quite the equal of a superb Van Dyck which Sir Rudolf fetched from another room.

  “Can’t think why the burglars didn’t lay hands on this, while they were about it,??
? he said.

  “Too difficult to get rid of, I imagine.”

  As they walked back along Church Street, Clare was rather silent. At last she said, “It’s fantastic. I’ve known you off and on for four years, and I had no notion you—”

  “My dear, why should you? You’re an artist. You’re interested in everything to do with that, and you shut everything else out. Very right and proper. The artist has quite enough distractions nowadays without—well, anyway, I don’t want you dabbling in crime.”

  “But that’s just what you made me do, isn’t it, putting me up to be inquisitive about the Durbars’ burglary?”

  Nigel laughed. “Oh, that’s not crime. That’s chickenfeed.”

  “Well, if you won’t tell me, you won’t.” Clare pouted, looking much younger than her twenty-six years. Presently she said, “You don’t seem to be doing much about this boy you’re supposed to be searching for.”

  “That remains to be seen,” was Nigel’s somewhat enigmatic reply.

  In one sense, it did not remain long. As the pair emerged from the passage into Clare’s courtyard, a hand was clamped over her mouth, and a cosh fell with hideous force upon Nigel’s head. Clare saw the man who had struck him bend over Nigel to strike again. She managed, wriggling convulsively with all the strength of her wiry body, to wrench herself from the man who held her, and went tooth and nail for Nigel’s assailant, screaming at the top of her voice. She had never known she could go berserk like this. Seizing a dustbin lid, she stood, like some Amazon in a classic battle frieze, over Nigel’s recumbent body. Both the attackers had handkerchiefs covering the lower part of their faces. Screaming for help still, she kicked out viciously at one and bashed the dustbin lid at the other’s eye.

  It was over almost as soon as it had begun. Help came—from an unexpected quarter. Alec Gray leaped out into the yard, sent one man reeling with a savage blow to the side of the head, and closed with his comrade, who broke free after a brief struggle, and the two shot away through the door, with Gray in pursuit.

  “No good,” he said, returning in a minute. “The blighters had a car outside. Clean getaway. Did they rob you?”

  Clare shook her head mutely, pointed at Nigel, and to her own fury burst into tears. They put a coat under Nigel’s head—his heart was beating, though faintly—and Gray went to ring for a doctor and the police. Dark hair streaming, eyes streaming with tears, Clare knelt beside Nigel. Her mind felt wispy, empty. The attack might have been a bad dream. She heard someone say, “Please, God, don’t let him die,” over and over again, and discovered that it was her own voice.

  One’s reactions were all so unimaginable. When Alec Gray returned, and they had satisfied themselves that Nigel was still breathing, Clare’s first words were, “You’ve caught the sun badly.”

  “What? Oh yes. I drove up from Southampton this morning. Just got back for lunch. In the nick, as they say, of time.”

  Gray’s shirt had been torn in the struggle, and Clare had seen a bright-red triangle of sunburn to the left of the base of his throat; the inside of his right forearm was the same color. It’s the sort of thing I would notice at a time like this, she thought. Bloody, self-centered artist. My little Ivory Towerist. Oh God! that’s what Nigel called me. Observing the pigmentation of skin when a man—when he is lying there, dying there perhaps.

  “Don’t glare at me like that, my poppet. I didn’t do it.”

  “Sorry,” said Clare, kneeling beside Nigel, her fingers trailing against his face. “It wasn’t meant for you.”

  “I’m going to get you a stiff drink,” said Alec Gray.

  8

  The Aftermath

  ON THIS SAME Friday morning, after Nigel left him, Inspector Wright had been trying to catch up with a mass of routine work. Among other reports which he was perusing, one specially caught his attention. At eleven forty-nine the previous night, in answer to a call, a Flying Squad car had proceeded to a house off Ladbroke Square. The occupant, a widow named Hale, had been sitting up for her son, a boy of twelve, who had gone with two friends to the Battersea Pleasure Gardens. At about eleven-thirty, hearing movements on the floor below, she left her room, thinking it was her son returning. He had a key to the back door. Going down the basement, where his bedroom was, she called out, “Is that you, Bertie? You’re very late.” There was no reply. She tried the bedroom door, but found it locked. She then woke up one of the lodgers, to help her break down the door. However, when they had got downstairs again, they found the door unlocked and the bedroom empty. Investigation shortly discovered a window at the back of the house which had been forced open. Mrs. Hale then telephoned for the police.

  What caught Inspector Wright’s eye in the report on this apparently trivial occurrence was Mrs. Hale’s statement, corroborated by the lodger, that on entering the bedroom they had noticed a faint smell of chloroform. The Flying Squad men asked her if any articles were missing. None, it appeared, but some blankets from the boy’s bed and a few tins of meat. The natural inference was that a vagrant had broken in, and been surprised. Mrs. Hale was in some distress that the boy had not yet returned, though he had left her a message not to wait up for him. However, following the policeman’s instructions, she had rung up Divisional H.Q. today, saying that her son was safe at home; he had returned in the small hours, tired out, having missed the last bus and been compelled to walk all the way, with his friends, carrying the blankets and a haversack of food which he had taken, so he said, for a picnic at the Pleasure Gardens.

  Inspector Wright raised his eyebrows momentarily at this last part of the statement; but the ways of small boys are sometimes past understanding, and he let it go. What interested him was that whiff of chloroform—a commodity not usually carried by vagrants. As the boy had been out of the house for several hours when his mother entered the bedroom, it could not be accounted for by his love of chemistry; nor had the Flying Squad men found a leaky bottle or impregnated rag in the room. There was just one chance in a hundred that a kidnaping attempt had been made.

  So Wright instructed a detective-sergeant and sent him off to Mrs. Hale’s house. He also rang up Nigel, found he was out, and left a message for him to call back as soon as he got home. Afterward, the Inspector never quite forgave himself for not following up this hunch in person. Yet it would be difficult for anyone else to blame him—a tired-out man fighting one sector of a crime wave with depleted forces—because he deputed to a subordinate officer a task which, by all the odds, would turn out a wild-goose chase.

  Unfortunately this officer, though a worthy and conscientious individual, had two disqualifications for his present job: he lacked the particular kind of imagination which can enter into a boy’s responses and thought processes; and years on the beat, before he graduated to the detective branch, had given him a ponderous, formidable professional manner.

  His first remark, when he entered the room where Bert Hale was still in bed, frightened and feverish, properly tore it.

  “Well, son,” he said, kindly at heart but Jehovah-like in manner, “you been in trouble?”

  For a boy who had spent hours in that rotting house off the Campden Hill Road, been frightened out of his wits by the obscene Quack, and then stunned by the spectacle of the man shot before his eyes—the head blown out of shape, the blood everywhere—this question was paralyzing. Bert knew, of course, that he had not, in fact, murdered the Quack. But he felt himself involved: the blood, the guilt, the anxiety of it had seeped into his mind like a thick fog. His mind, struggling hard to maintain its balance, selected one real, though trivial, aspect from the whole irrational pile of guilt which weighed upon it—namely, his having broken into a house and lied to his mother. He could feel bad about this, reproach himself for it; and as long as he concentrated upon it, he could keep the major horrors at bay. But the appearance of this policeman seemed to reopen the flood gates. Bert was sure he had come to arrest him for breaking into a house, for murder perhaps. Cowering under the bedclothes, he sa
id, “No. No, sir.”

  “Out on the tiles last night, weren’t you, son?” said the Sergeant, in what he fondly imagined was a jovial tone, though to Bert it sounded like the crack of doom.

  “Yes, sir. I—we missed the last bus.”

  “Your mum was very worried about you, I expect.” Bert’s lips quivered at this unconsciously devastating thrust. He could not answer.

  “Well now, Bert—Bert’s the name, isn’t it? I’ve not come to talk about that. Let bygones by bygones, I always say.” Sitting on the bed, the Sergeant theatrically relaxed. “You’re a bit of an engineer, I hear. Model boats, and such-like, eh?”

  “Yes, I’m keen on models,” replied Bert suspiciously.

  “Sail’em on the Round Pond, I suppose?”

  Bright and frightened as a guinea pig’s, Bert’s eyes regarded the Sergeant from above the bedclothes. He nodded.

  “Now what I’ve come to ask you, old man—we’ve had complaints about two rough customers trying to steal boys’ boats from them. Wondered if you’d had any trouble of that sort.”

  The Sergeant smiled, in self-congratulation on this splendidly tactful approach. To Bert, it looked like the grin of a ravenous alligator. The whole dire chain of events rose up in his mind, ready to bind him hand and foot if he admitted one link of it. He just could not be sensible about this. He felt absolutely certain that, once he had told this bobby about the speedboat, everything else would come out; and from such revelations he shrank with all the accumulated fear of his small being.

  “Oh no, sir,” he said.

  “You’re quite sure, son? No need to be frightened. We wouldn’t let ’em do anything to you, if that’s what worries you.”

  “Quite sure,” lied Bert, swallowing hard.

  “Any of your young friends been pestered?”

  “No, sir.”

  The Sergeant asked him a good many more questions. But Bert had begun to feel some command of the situation; with a schoolboy’s deadly instinct for a teacher’s weak spot, he now sensed that there was no real confidence behind the Sergeant’s interrogation. Had this worthy man taken Bert into his confidence, told him that the whole police force of London was looking for Dai Williams’ message and that maybe Britain’s fate depended upon it, Bert would have seen himself as the hero of the piece, and come clean. But the Sergeant had no vein of fantasy; nor would he ever rid himself now of the orthodoxy that a detective’s job is to ask questions, not to give information. He had a short talk with Mrs. Hale, borrowed her most recent photograph of Bert, and took his departure.