JOHN DICKSON CARR

JOHN DICKSON CARR HE WHO WHISPERS

INTERNATIONAL POLYGONICS, LTD. NEW YORK CITY

HE WHO WHISPERS

Copyright? 1946 by John Dickson Carr. Copyright renewed 1974 by John Dickson Carr.

Cover: Copyright? 1986 by International Polygonics, Ltd.

Library of Congress Card Catalog No. 86-80382 ISBN 0-930330-38-2

Printed and manufactured in the United States of America by Guinn Printing. First IPL printing May 1986. 10 98765432

"Anyone who can read the first chapter of this book without continuing to the end is no true mystery fan."

-Isaac Anderson The New York Times "Fell's explanation of these baffling matters is of the tricky variety which always delights his followers." Vie New Yorker "Required reading." The Saturday Review of Literature "Mr. Carr yields to no man or woman in the art of mystery trickery. ... Grade A of its kind, with such a display of mystery jugglery as you'll hardly find elsewhere." -Will Guppy

JOHN DICKSON CARR

Available in Library of Crime Classics? editions.

Dr. Gideon Fell Novels:

BELOW SUSPICION HAG'S NOOK HE WHO WHISPERS THE HOUSE AT SATAN'S ELBOW THE PROBLEM OF THE GREEN CAPSULE THE SLEEPING SPHINX THE THREE COFFINS TIL DEATH DO US PART

Non-series:

THE BURNING COURT Writing as Carter Dickson

Sir Henry Merrivale Novels:

HE WOULD NT KILL PATIENCE THE JUDAS WINDOW NINE-AND DEATH MAKES TEN THE PEACOCK FEATHER MURDERS THE PUNCH AND JUDY MURDERS Douglas G. Greene, series consultant

Chapter I

A dinner of the Murder Club--our first meeting in more than five years

--will be held at Beltring's Restaurant on Friday, June 1st, at 8:30 p.m. The speaker will be Professor Rigaud. Guests have not hitherto been permitted; but if you, my dear Hammond, would care to come along as my guest . . . ?

THAT, he thought, was a sign of the times.

A fine rain was falling, less a rain than a sort of greasy mist, when Miles Hammond turned off Shaftesbury Avenue into Dean Street. Though you could tell little from the darkened sky, it must be close on half-past nine o'clock. To be invited to a dinner of the Murder Club, and then to get there nearly an hour late, was more than mere discourtesy; it was infernal, unpardonable cheek even though you had a good reason.

And yet, as he reached the first turning where Romilly Street trails along the outskirts of Soho, Miles Hammond stopped.

A sign of the times, the letter in his pocket A sign, in this year nineteen-forty-five, that peace had crept back unwillingly to Europe. And he couldn't get used to it.

Miles looked round him.

On his left, as he stood at the corner of Romilly Street, was the east wall of St. Anne's Church. The grey wall, with its big round-arched window, stood up almost intact. But there was no glass in the window, and nothing beyond except a grey-white tower seen through it. Where high explosive had ripped along Dean Street, making chaos of matchboard houses and spilling strings of garlic into the road along with broken glass and mortar-dust, they had now built a neat staticwater tank--with barbed wire so that children shouldn't fall in and get drowned. But the scars remained, under whispering rain. On the east wall of St Anne's, just under that gaping window, was an old plaque commemorating the sacrifice of those who died in the last war.

Unreal!

No, Miles Hammond said to himself, it was no good calling this feeling morbid or fanciful or a product of war-nerves. His whole life now, good fortune as well as bad, was unreal.

Long ago you enter the Army, with a notion that solid walls are crumbling and that something must be done about it somehow. You get, unheroically, that form of Dieseloil-poisoning

which in the Tank Corps is nevertheless as deadly as anything Jerry throws at you. For eighteen months you lie in a hospital bed, between white galling sheets, with a passage of time so slow that time itself grows meaningless. Arid then, when the trees are coming into leaf for the second time, they write and tell you that Uncle Charles has died-- cosily as always, in a safe hotel in Devon--and that you and your sister have inherited everything.

Have you always been naggingly short of money? Here's all you want

Have you always been fond of that house in the New Forest, with Uncle Charlie's library attached? Enter!

Have you--far more than cither of these things--longed for freedom from the stifle of crowding, the sheer pressure of humanity like the physical pressure of travellers packed into a bus? Freedom from regimentation, with space to move and breathe again? Freedom to read and dream, without a sense of duty towards anybody and everybody? All this should be possible too, if the war is ever finished.

Then, gasping out to the end like a gauleiter swallowing poison, the war is over. You come out of hospital--a little shakily, your dischargepapers in your pocket--into a London still pinched by shortages; a London of long queues, erratic buses, dry pubs; a London where they turn on the street-lights, and immediately turn them off again to save fuel; but a place free at last from the intolerable weight of threats.

People didn't celebrate that victory hysterically, as for some reason or other the newspapers liked to make out. What the news-reels showed was only a bubble on the huge surface of the town. Like himself, Miles Hammond thought, most people were a little apathetic because they could not yet think of it as reaL

But something awoke, deep down inside human beings' hearts, when the cricket results crept back into the papers and the bunks began to disappear from the Underground. Even peace-time institutions like the Murder Club . . .

"This won't do!" said Miles Hammond. He pulled his dripping hat further over his eyes, and turned to the right down Romilly Street towards Beltring's Restaurant.

There was Beltring's on the left, four floors once painted white and still faintly whitish in the dusk. Distantly a late bus rumbled in

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