The Whisper in the Gloom

  “Don’t fidget!” he said sharply. He was fidgety enough himself, though, Bert noticed: as he talked he pranced up and down the room; or leaned against the door, his head jerking, the hand which had held the razor plucking at his lower lip. He was like a restless marionette.

  Bert did not dare whisper to Foxy. The knowledge he dared not impart swelled in him painfully, till he felt he must yell it out or burst. At last, when the man stopped his flow of talk for a minute, Bert put up his hand, as if he were in class, and said, “Please, sir, may we go home now?”

  “Not yet, boys. I’ve got a friend coming to fetch me. Be here any moment now. Like you to meet him. I expect you’re wondering what I’m doing here. Well, chaps—Brain and Foxy—I’ll tell you.” The man’s tongue flickered over his lips. “I used to live here, you see. Happiest days of my life. When I was your age. I’m going abroad, you see. Going to start a new life. And I thought I’d pay a last pilgrimage to the old place, before I left.”

  “Were you here when the place was blitzed?” asked Foxy. Anything to humor this crackpot.

  The man started talking again: bomb stories now. Foxy relaxed. Not so, Bert. Bert could feel his nerve fraying, fraying, as if the secret within him was sawing at it. Suddenly, as the Quack’s to-and-fro pacing took him away from the door, Bert heard himself whimper, was on his feet, making a dart for it. An arm, that seemed to elongate like a shadow, shot out and hurled him back across the room. His head struck the wall. He thought he was going to be sick.

  “No you don’t, my Brain.” The man’s face, gray-white as a fungus, hovered over him. There were streaks of light in the gloom, which Bert’s swimming eyes could not at first identify.

  “Stop waving that razor about, you bastard,” said Foxy, loud and clear. It diverted the Quack’s attention, anyway. He turned on Foxy.

  “Have you every had a tonsillectomy?”

  “Come again.”

  “Have you had your tonsils out?”

  Foxy shook his head.

  “Well, you will, damned soon, if you and your young friend don’t behave. Without anesthetics.”

  In the silence that followed, a seed of sound began to germinate. A car engine. The car must be coming up Campden Hill Road. Then the car stopped, some way off.

  “I dare say that’ll be my friend. If it is, we shall have to lock you in here. If you keep quite quiet, we shall only lock you in. I prescribe absolute silence, you understand—before, during, and after. Otherwise I shall have to operate.”

  Bert and Foxy froze. They could feel the pulses in their temples ticking as loud as giant clocks. After another eternity, there came a tap on the shutters—a light tap, but it made the boys start as if it had been an explosion.

  “Remember what I said? Not a move. Not a sound.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man was at the window, fingering the shutters. Through the chink, he muttered something they could not catch; it might have been a password.

  “O.K., Quack. Open up,” came a low voice from outside; not too low, though, for the boys to miss the American accent of the speaker. The Quack, with one threatening glance at them, folded back the shutters. They saw a cylindrical object poke in suddenly out of the night. They heard it give a quick, thudding cough. The Quack’s hands gripped the shutters, as if against a whirlwind blowing into the room. His head was punched back on his shoulders: it seemed to have gone out of shape. Then, slow as the start of a landslide, he began falling to the floor.

  7

  Rapiers and Bludgeons

  IT WAS THE morning of Friday, August 6th. Nigel Strangeways strolled toward Clare Massinger’s studio, chewing over what Inspector Wright had just told him. Four boys had been reported missing in the London area since the murder of Dai Williams, but three had already been found and none of the four corresponded with the boy Nigel had met in the Gardens; he was sure of this, after studying their photographs. The inference seemed clear. Either Dai Williams’ murderers had found the boy, and terrorized him into silence after getting possession of the message; or else they were still looking for him. The former was more likely. Dai Williams would surely have indicated in his message that it should be passed on to the police. Why had the boy not done so, then, unless he had been frightened off it? Well, perhaps he and his young friend were trying some amateur detection: the lad called “Foxy” might be in it; but Foxy had not returned to the studio after the rencontre with Alec Gray.

  More to Inspector Wright’s immediate purpose was the disappearance of the Quack. Every policeman in the country had his description: his photograph was in the papers; his movements had been traced to a Camden Town lodging house. But this he had left two days ago, and the trail petered out. There was just the “information received” from a member of the general public, who had seen a man leave Kensington Gardens shortly after the murder, been struck by his peculiar walk and appearance, and identified him from the Scotland Yard files. But the Quack had vanished off the face of the earth.

  Remembering his recent interview with Sam Borch, Inspector Wright was uneasy. He relied, more than he would admit to himself, on intuition. When he had questioned Borch about Herbert James, known to some as “the Quack,” he had received no impression of fear, guilt, or protective reserve on Borch’s part. It was Wright’s experience that, if you touched a criminal on his sore spot, you always got some perceptible reaction: it might be an outburst of crude bluster; or only a sort of slight drawing in, as it were, of the sensitive horns. Mention of Alec Gray had produced this reaction from Borch; mention of the Quack had not. Yet there ought to be a tie-up between Dai Williams, Borch, and Gray. Why else had Williams been killed?

  Chewing it over now, Nigel found himself mentally biting on a piece of grit. Dai Williams, nosing after Sam Borch, had got onto a character he called “the toff.” Gray fitted in with this character: at least, he was a young man about town who had been in an excellent position to give inside information about households where burglaries had, in fact, recently taken place. Borch was suspected of being a receiver. Gray frequently visited Borch’s night club. So far, so good. But did the murder of Dai Williams really fit in? A gang, or more than one gang, was active on these thefts; but gangs concerned in burglary did not, as a rule, carry violence to the point of planned murder. They would cosh a night watchman: they might certainly terrorize a suspected informer—beat him up or razor him. What seemed unlikely was that they should use a dope-fiend ex-doctor to kill this informer. The method of Dai Williams’ murder ruled out any chance that it had been intimidation which accidentally went too far. Was it not possible, then, that Dai Williams’ secret related to something quite different? that, following up one kind of criminal, Dai had fortuitously stumbled over a more sinister, a far more dangerous kind?

  When Clare Massinger let Nigel into her studio, he found the throne occupied by a regal figure. Lady Hesione Durbar had put on weight, perhaps, since her theater days: but she had the gift of vitality in repose; her deep blue eyes were unclouded by the petulance or ennui of the rich, spoiled woman, and the merciless north light could find no fault with her shoulders, bared for the sitting, shapely and pure as snowdrifts. She was a great enjoyer of life, evidently; and, Nigel quickly realized, a frank enjoyer of male company. She began to flirt with him almost as soon as they were introduced—to flirt in the grand manner, like a stage queen with the ambassador of some major foreign power. The great eyes opened wide to engulf him, the lovely blond head lifted and consciously poised itself for his admiration.

  “Don’t forget,” said Clare Massinger sharply. “You’ve lost the pose. Head down a little, please. That’s better.”

  Hesione Durbar gave Nigel an arrant wink, revealing the gamine beneath the stately façade. He noticed that Clare was pummeling and thwacking the clay with more than her usual aggressiveness. Her sharp, narrow-eyed scrutinies of the subject had something witch-like about them.

  “Be careful you don’t give me a thick ear, darling,” said Lady Durba
r. Then, to Nigel, “You’ve tried this, Mr. Strangeways, haven’t you? Face massage by proxy?”

  “Yes, I’m sitting for Clare now. It’s an odd experience, watching one’s double emerging out of a lump of clay. Have you seen Foxy again?”

  “Foxy? Oh, that angel child who gate-crashed my party. You’ve come across him too, have you?”

  “You know he gate-crashed in here, the morning after it? Pursued by a boor?”

  Clare shot Nigel a warning glance, which he refused to accept. “Yes, a young neighbor of Clare’s. What’s his name?”

  “Gray,” said Clare abruptly.

  “Not Alec? What was he doing here?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. You know him, Lady Durbar? He seemed to be suffering from a delusion that this Foxy was spying on him. He was remarkably aggressive. Clare had to throw a lump of clay at him. Why should he think he was being spied on?”

  “You never told me this, Clare,” said Hesione.

  “Well, no,” Clare uncomfortably replied.

  “Now I must get this straight. I’m pretty well a moron, so just please explain in simple words what happened, Mr. Strangeways, will you?”

  Mr. Strangeways explained. Lady Durbar listened attentively, her red mouth a little open, showing the small, regular teeth.

  “But how utterly weird! What can Alec have been thinking of?” she said, when Nigel had finished. Her voice now sounded artificial, synthetic—the accent of the actress overlaying her natural tones. She seemed, thought Nigel, more disturbed than the story warranted, and it gave her face a stupid expression.

  “I think we’d better stop.” Clare said, laying down her tools. “I can’t work if we’re going to have a conversazione.”

  “Sorry, love. It’s my fault. Look, will you come to lunch, and bring Mr. Strangeways with you?”

  “Well, actually—” began Clare.

  “We’d simply love to. It’s most kind of you, Lady Durbar,” Nigel broke in, administering to Clare a sort of covert, ocular kick.

  “Now what are you up to?” Clare asked, when her patron had swept out. “First you ruin a sitting for me, and then you involve me in a lunch party I just haven’t time for.”

  “I’m interested in the glamorous Lady Durbar.”

  “So I noticed.”

  “You look very beautiful, prowling up and down with your hair swirling, and spitting with rage.”

  “I must say you put your flat feet in it all right. Didn’t you know Alec Gray was her Ladyship’s fancy man?”

  “Of course I knew. I’ve intrigued her. That’s why she asked a total stranger to lunch on the spur of the moment.”

  “You flatter yourself. Well, I suppose I’d better get on with you, as you’ve driven out my millionaire client. But you really are maddening, Nigel.”

  Presently, as he sat on the chair vacated by Hesione Durbar, and Clare Massinger was scraping little slivers of clay from the head, he surprised her by saying, “You’re inordinately interested in the Durbars’ burglary.”

  “Am I?” Clare absently replied.

  “Yes. You’re going to be quite a bore about it at lunch. You simply won’t be able to keep off the subject.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Nanny says so. It’s a star part I am offering you. The beautiful, slinky agente provocatrice.”

  “Chin up a little. Head a shade to the left. What is this nonsense you’re talking?”

  “I’m going to plunge you into reality, my little Ivory Towerist. Full instructions will be given you presently.”

  “Bossy old bastard,” she grumbled….

  Over the top of his Martini, Nigel studied Sir Rudolf Durbar. The great man was leaning back at one end of a sofa, being immensely agreeable to Clare Massinger. He had charm—no doubt of that; but one felt it was cultivated rather than innate: it was not exactly turned on, but as it were laid on, like all the other amenities of this fabulous house—part of a pattern of life which would include, for example, Nigel imagined, Sir Rudolf’s instructing his secretary to choose a suitable present for Lady Hesione’s birthday. To the general public, Sir Rudolf was a man of mystery; his yacht, his magnificent houses, his wife and her parties, the huge yet unobtrusive philanthropies—all these were familiar to anyone who could read a newspaper. But only a very small circle knew about his origins, or the exact nature and extent of his ramifying “interests” in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East, while fewer still had any intimate knowledge of the man himself. Behind the façade of wealth and power, he worked as anonymously as a revolutionary. He did not, in the traditional manner of his kind, call attention to himself either by personal asceticism or exorbitant ostentation. His appetites, no less than his opinions, seemed to be moderate. The word “cosmopolitan” fitted him as well as any other, if it can be taken to define the man who is at ease everywhere and at home nowhere, who has innumerable contacts but no allegiance. He did not appear to make a fetish of work or a business of pleasure. Nigel was not the first student of human nature to find himself wondering what made Sir Rudolf Durbar tick.

  A secretary came in, whispering discreetly to his employer, “New York on the telephone, Sir Rudolf.”

  “What? No, not now. Tell them I’ll call back after lunch. No, wait a minute—you handle it, Charles. You know the set-up.”

  It was rather impressive—the informality, the decentralization, the light, quick tones of the resonant voice. Nigel toyed with the fantasy of some gigantic merger, tottering in the balance like a caber, tossed to the gratified secretary to deal with.

  “No wonder we’re nearly bankrupt,” Lady Durbar whispered to him, a certain affectionate pride in her voice. “Rudolf hates people ringing up at mealtimes.”

  “Drake hated people who interrupted his game of bowls.”

  Hesione slapped him on the arm; it was a habit carried over from her unregenerate days; one expected a whoop of shrill, coarse laughter to go with it. “Oh, Drake was an old pirate,” she protested.

  Meaning, thought Nigel, that she fancies Sir Rudolf as a bit of an old pirate himself.

  Sir Rudolf was giving Clare his attention, arguing animatedly with her about the technical merits of a recent work by Epstein. His broad, square shoulders; the head, with its strong nose and deep-set eyes, firmly set upon them; the bronze complexion—all contributed to a sculptural effect, an effect of mass, weight, solidity—of something carved out of one block, primitive yet subtle. Nigel wondered how Hesione Durbar could have found an acceptable substitute for this in the crude, brutal Alec Gray, and wondered still more that Sir Rudolf should permit it. One could not for a moment imagine him being hoodwinked; nor, on the other hand, did his attitude to Hesione give any grounds for supposing that their relationship was extinct, or that he despised her and was beyond caring what she did.

  At lunch, when Clare opened up a vein of chatter about the robbery, Nigel was conscious of Sir Rudolf’s eyes turned speculatively upon him: their gaze was a little arrogant and extremely shrewd; one felt that Sir Rudolf could quite effortlessly keep a jump ahead of any rival, and would make a formidable adversary.

  “But, my dear,” Hesione was saying, “anyone’d think it was me who’d committed a felony. Those wonderful policemen of ours keep nagging me about having had a cannibal party at all. They say it was asking for trouble.”

  “So it was, darling,” said her husband pleasantly.

  “And they’ve asked me fifty times, if they’ve asked me once, whose idea it was. And now the insurance people are being beastly about it too.”

  “They have to go into these things.”

  “You mean,” said Clare, “whoever suggested that sort of fancy-dress affair, with blackened faces, may be an accomplice of the burglars?”

  “Exactly! And it’s quite idiotic. It was either Rudie’s idea or mine—niether of us is quite sure which.”

  “Then the police started up about Alec. Did Alec put the idea into my head? Did Alec know the safe combination?”

  ??
?Oh come, my dear, they didn’t put it quite like that.”

  “Well, it was obvious who they meant. Any intimate friends of the family, or frequent guests—you know—the usual patter of big boots.”

  “And did he?” asked Clare in her forthright way.

  “Did who what?”

  “Did Alec know the combination? or anyone else?”

  Lady Durbar sipped her Moselle, holding the glass cupped in both hands, like a child. “I’ve no notion,” she said carelessly.

  “You really are impossible, Hess,” said her husband, laughing.

  Clare remarked, “I do believe you rather admire your wife for taking it all so lightly.”

  “Perhaps I do.”

  “Rudie has been wonderful about it.” Hesione exchanged a long glance with her husband,

  “Well, they were your jewels, after all,” he said.

  There was a lull in the conversation, while another course was handed round. Then Clare began again. “It must be queer, having policemen on the premises. What do they do?—take everyone’s fingerprints?”

  Sir Rudolf’s quick, deep voice bore in. “You should ask Mr. Strangeways. He knows all about police work, Miss Massinger.”

  Clare’s surprise was none the less convincing for being quite genuine. And a good thing too, thought Nigel.

  “You know all about police work?” she said to him, in great astonishment.

  “Not all. A little.”

  Both women were gazing at him with the bright, encouraging look of aunts who have discovered an unexpected talent in a rather moderately endowed small nephew.

  “Why have you never told me this?” pursued Clare.

  “Mr. Strangeways,” remarked their host affably, “hides his light under a bushel.”

  “But not from you, apparently,” Clare said.

  Nigel observed, “Sir Rudolf is a very well-informed man.”

  “You know, Hess, you ought to get Strangeways to investigate this robbery of yours. If he’s not too busy now. He’s pretty hot, by all accounts.”