The Whisper in the Gloom Read online

  Mr. Borch, puffing at a cigar, beaming co-operatively or wrinkling his brow in thought, replied happily to Sergeant Allen’s questions. He was on very safe ground now, and he enjoyed an opportunity to exercise his talents as an actor.

  “Well, much obliged to you, sir. I think that is all,” said Inspector Wright, his watchful, lantern face relaxing. “Oh, just one more thing. You know a Mr. Alec Gray.”

  Mr. Borch’s pudgy fist, enclosing the cigar, came slowly toward his mouth; the knuckle of his thumb rubbed up and down against the pendulous lower lip.

  “Mr. Gray? Oh yes, he comes here often. He’s an old member of the club. A very high-spirited young gentleman.”

  Inspector Wright stood by the door, as if in thought, saying nothing. It was the ordeal by silence; and after a minute a bead of perspiration came slowly trickling down Sam Borch’s forehead.

  “He’s not in any trouble, I hope?” said Mr. Borch, a note of solicitude in his rich voice. He switched on an electric fan. “Damned stuffy today.”

  “Yes, it is, sir. And I dare say it’ll be getting warmer before long. I suppose Mr. Gray brings guests here from time to time?”

  “He does. Lady Durbar comes quite often with him. And—”

  “Is Mr. Gray a personal friend of yours, may I ask?”

  Mr. Borch took a moment to reply. “We’re on good terms, Inspector. But of course I’m not intimate with him, if that’s what you mean.”

  “May I see your visitors’ book, sir, please?”

  “You’re welcome, Inspector.”

  Mr. Borch rang a bell and the manager was sent to fetch the book. Inspector Wright noted that, on his last visit a week ago, the high-spirited Mr. Gray had brought four guests—Lady Durbar, Miss Felicity Smythe, G. Fawkes, Esq., and J. Stalin, Esq. He pointed to the two last names, remarking austerely, “This won’t do at all, Mr. Borch.”

  “I quite agree. Mr. Antrobus, how was this allowed to happen? You know my instructions.” Mr. Borch was almost wheezing with anger. “You know perfectly well we don’t allow any funny business here.”

  “I’m exceedingly sorry, Mr. Borch. I’ll speak to the doorman about it.”

  “And who, in fact, were the persons who adopted these pseudonyms? Do you remember them?”

  Tapping his desk, Mr. Borch looked sharply at Mr. Antrobus, who was only too willing to oblige. Messrs. Fawkes and Stalin turned out to have been two young sprigs, one a Guardee, the other on Lloyds, whose faces were familiar to him through the pages of the Tatler.

  Outside in the street again, Inspector Wright waggled his little finger at a man who was killing time on the opposite pavement. Then he remarked to Sergeant Allen, as they walked off, “Well, my lad, what did you make of him?”

  “A smooth customer, sir.”

  “I don’t mind telling you,” said Wright in a spurt of cold violence which made the Sergeant glance up sharply, “I’d like to stamp him into the pavement.”

  Well, they’d stirred him up. And, if Strangeways’ hunch was correct, Borch would soon try to get in touch with Gray. The Exchanges would have a record of telephone calls at either end—Wright had arranged for this. And, if Borch paid a visit in person, Jones would be on his tail. At this point, with luck, they might find a link and begin hauling in the chain. If there was some criminal association between the two, Borch would be bound to warn the other about the police inquiries.

  Sam Borch questioned Mr. Antrobus as to what the police officers had said before his arrival, then dismissed him. His hand went to the telephone, but he withdrew it. Walking downstairs, he passed through the empty kitchen, and down another flight of steps to the cellars. He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, opened the door, entered, locked it again behind him. Stooping, he went up to a wine bin, whose racks of bottles stretched from floor to ceiling. Absent-mindedly he stroked one of the bottles; it was a vintage which did not find its way to the tables upstairs, but was reserved for use in his own private room. Mr. Borch bent down, fiddled a moment, then swung the whole framework of racks away from the wall, on its concealed hinge. Behind it lay a door in the wall, itself invisible except to an expert searcher. Mr. Borch passed through this into a narrow, vaulted passage, up some steps, unlocked another door, and was in the back room of a second-hand clothes shop. He whistled a few bars of a merry little tune. A respectable-looking woman entered from the shop, betraying no apparent surprise at finding Mr. Borch in her back room.

  “You want to go out, sir?” she asked, in an accent not English.

  Mr. Borch nodded. The woman, returning to her shop, glanced out from behind the clothes hanging in its window, left and right along the alley.

  “All clear, sir,” she said.

  Mr. Borch went out into the passage, and sallied forth through the private door which lay to the right of the shop window. This was his escape hatch—a secret known to none but himself and a few of his contacts. It was still sunny outside, but Mr. Borch was not quite the little ray of sunshine he had appeared, earlier this morning, to the employees of Alhambra Court. He walked rapidly up the alley. There was a telephone booth just where this joined the street, but Mr. Borch ignored it; instead, taking a twopence ride on a bus, he telephoned from a booth at Oxford Circus, the best part of a mile from his club. Attention to detail was one of Mr. Borch’s watchwords.

  Ten minutes later, he re-entered the second-hand garment shop, went up to his room in The High Dive, lit another cigar, and emerged in due course from the front door of the club. The plain-clothes man, Jones, bored stiff with reading books from the one-shilling tray of the shop opposite, followed Mr. Borch at a respectful distance. Mr. Borch was well aware he was being followed. Pursing his rosebud mouth, he began to whistle: it was a cheering thought, that the dick would report him as having stayed in the club for half an hour after Inspector Wright had left, and then having strolled along to the Ivy. It was even more gratifying to consume a large and lengthy lunch there while the dick, outside, consumed his soul in patience….

  That same afternoon—it was Thursday, August 5th, the day after the scene in Clare Massinger’s studio—Nigel Strangeways was talking to Inspector Wright. Like every other senior police officer in London, Wright was feeling the strain of conducting an abnormal number of investigations with depleted forces: he had to hold a line which the enemy attacked at many different points, and attacked in an unusually audacious manner. Moreover, though the safety of the Russian delegation was specifically the affair of the Special Branch, the Soviet Embassy’s being in Wright’s district did not lighten his task, for its officials were prickly, somewhat exacting, and difficult to deal with.

  After many hours of inquiry at the Durbars’ house and among those who had been guests at the party on the 3rd, it was established that the robbery could only have been brought off by inside information of a very special kind. Briefly a concealed safe in Lady Durbar’s bedroom had been opened, some time between seven o’clock that evening and three-fifteen the next morning, when she went to put away the jewelry she had worn at the party, and valuables to the amount of some £50,000 had been stolen. The safe was not forced; so the criminal must have known, not only its position, but the combination of the lock. There were no suspicious marks on the window sill, the wall, or the ground below; no fingerprints, except Lady Durbar’s and her husband’s, on the safe. What made the investigators’ task still more difficult was her statement that no one but she and her husband knew the combination. Her personal maid, and the rest of the staff, had all been with the family for some time, so little or no suspicion could be attached to them.

  It was true that a highly skilled operator could hope, by trial and error, and with unlimited time at his disposal, to discover the combination; but the only two criminals, known to the police, who possessed this extraordinary sensitivity of touch and hearing, and could break combinations by listening to the fall of the tumblers, were safely in jail. Besides, unlimited time was an article the criminal could least of all rely on; for the bedroom was not locked (a criminal piece of negligence, Wright grimly commented), guests were wandering all over the house, and some of them on their own admission had peered in to catch a glimpse of the room’s fabled splendors. One of the police’s most backbreaking tasks had been to compile, by interviewing each of the two hundred odd guests, a list of the approximate periods during which the bedroom had been empty.

  “Whose idea was this farcical party?” asked Nigel, when Wright had given him a résumé of the investigations up to date.

  The Inspector gave him a quick, approving grin. “Just what I asked myself. Sir Rudolf said it was his wife’s. She thought it was his; but she’s a vague, scatter-brained type. A shocking bad witness.”

  “You know that Gray is rumored to be her lover?”

  “It has come to my ears,” replied the Inspector dryly. “So he’d be apt to know the combination of the safe?”

  “And she to protect him by saying he didn’t. Also, he’d be in a position to suggest to her the idea of a party for which the guests wore black faces with their fancy dress. Does he fit in with any of the other robberies?”

  Inspector Wright nibbled at the inside of a forefinger. “Gray is what used to be called a young-man-about-town. He has been a guest, more or less frequent, at four out of the five big houses where we’ve had robberies this week. But so have a good many other people. They’re a sort of Inner Circle, that set—always going the round of the same stations.”

  “And the same hostesses, don’t forget. Gray is clearly attractive to the sex.”

  “Oh, we’ll take him apart, don’t you worry, if we’re reasonably sure there’s anything to find. A link with Borch would’ve been enough. But I reckon we’ve fallen down on that one—there’s been no communication between them since I interviewed Borch.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Nothing’s sure in this world. But Sam B. has been behaving like the driven snow ever since. He stayed in the club for half an hour after we left; no telephone calls from there. Had lunch at the Ivy, alone, no telephone calls—my chap verified that. Returned to Alhambra Court, etc., etc. You’d think he’d taken a pledge against using the instrument. Same the other end: Gray has had a few calls, but nothing suspicious.”

  “So now what?”

  “So now you find that red-headed boy you let trickle through your fingers,” said Inspector Wright, unsmiling. He was not a man to gloss over incompetence—his own or anyone else’s. “Lady Durbar seemed a bit gone on him: she’ll probably give you a reward.”

  “The boy who knows the boy who owns a model speedboat. Or does he? He didn’t turn up again this morning at Miss Massinger’s studio, by the way.”

  “You frightened him off,” said Wright sourly. Then, with a surprisingly intense appeal in his voice, the dark eyes boring into Nigel as if he were trying to hypnotize him, he added, “Find him, Mr. Strangeways. We’ve got to reach that boy Dai Williams passed the message to. He’s bound to be in danger. His life is—” the Inspector’s hand, palm downward, tipped over rapidly from side to side, like something trembling in the balance….

  In his luxury apartment, Elmer J. Steig put away the street map of London he had been studying and began to clean and load his revolver. The new instructions he had received, though unexpected, were not unwelcome. Inactivity bored him; and while he was far from being a sociable character, it irked him to remain for so long at a stretch in his apartments, however luxuriously appointed. Even the comics had begun to pall—not that the comics amounted to much in this goddamned, crummy little country. Now, he could keep his hand in, and earn an extra premium. Mr. Steig was a very highly paid executive indeed.

  He examined the magazine of his automatic, gave a faint smile like a glint of sun on an icicle, and reached out for another violet cachou.

  6

  A Home from Home

  “BREAKING AND ENTERING,” said Copper severely. “It won’t do, chummies.”

  Foxy made a rude noise.

  “But we’ve planned it this way. And it wouldn’t be breaking,” argued Bert. “I mean, there’s no glass left in the windows. All we do—”

  “Loitering with intent,” said Copper.

  “With intent to do what, my good man? You know there’s nothing left to steal in those houses, so how could I be loitering with intent to steal?”

  Copper was shaken for a moment by this logic. The he said, “You might be going to commit willful damage to the premises; or arson; or a nuisance.”

  “Keep it clean, mate,” said Foxy.

  “Well, what do you suggest? Isn’t this why we chose the house? Have you any better ideas? The meeting is thrown open to discussion.”

  “I’m just telling you, that’s all,” said Copper stolidly.

  Foxy snapped his fingers. “So what? If the Brain does get pinched for loitering or any of that crap, what’s it matter? He’ll be safe enough in the cooler, see—safer than in that bloody old ruin.”

  Bert rapped on the table. “No expletives, gentlemen, if you please. That’s all very well, Foxy, but my mother wouldn’t like me to be in prison.”

  “Your mother wouldn’t like it if you were kidnaped, or they cut your throat.”

  “You’ve got something there,” said Copper….

  His legalistic objections were to a plan that Bert should go to ground for a few days in one of a row of detached, bomb-damaged houses off Campden Hill Road. Things had been getting hot for the president of the Martian society. The bogus commercial traveler had not returned; but yesterday, a few hours after his visit, another man had come to the house, inquiring about lodgings. There were none vacant, Mrs. Hale told him. She did not tell him that he was, in any case, the class of lodger for whom she preferred not to cater. Unfortunately, his persistence got him into her sanctum on the ground floor—a sanctum adorned with photographs of Bert. As the visitor left, Bert, peering up from his den in the basement, caught an eyeful of him: it was the second of the two men who had accosted him in the Gardens—the unpalatable character with the knuckle-duster, called Fred.

  No doubt, at this point, Bert should have told his mother the whole story. Left to himself, he would have done so. But by this time his fellow Martians had succumbed to a virulent attack of detection fever; and Bert, together with a boy’s limited sense of realities, had a boy’s exaggerated fear of betraying fear to his friends, particularly when he is their accepted leader. He knew that his influence over Foxy and Copper was one of brain rather than brawn, and that at any grave sign of weakness on his part they would very likely depose him or even gang up against him.

  Bert’s decision to hide out had been made only a quarter of an hour ago, and was the result of information brought to him hotfoot by his friends. Quite by chance, they had seen the red-faced “commercial traveler” walk out of a pub early this afternoon. They tracked him, at a respectful distance, from Notting Hill Gate up past the water tower along Campden Hill Road. Presently he turned left, and walking beside a row of bomb-damaged houses, stopped opposite one of them to light a cigarette. He then moved on, and caught a bus in Church Street, evading further pursuit.

  On this being reported to Bert, he conceived a plan which should, at one stroke, alleviate his own considerable trepidation about the red-faced man and establish himself in his friends’ opinion as a tough and daring type. He would have insisted even more firmly on the necessity for his own temporary disappearance, had his friends been able to report a conversation which took place in the pub not long before they saw the red-faced man leaving it. He had, by tact, bonhomie, and plentiful treating, elicited from one of Mrs. Hale’s lodgers a number of useful facts about the house—amongst them, the position of Bert’s bedroom.

  So now, Copper’s objections (which were, as his father might have said, a purely routine matter) being swept aside, the three worked out ways and means by which Bert should be secreted and kept supplied in one of the derelict houses. The Martian Society had had its eye on the houses for some time, as a good hideout area in case of emergencies. The house in which they had decided to seclude Bert that evening was one they had previously chosen as ideal. It was concealed from the road by a shrubbery, and friends of theirs had often used it as an illicit playground, since it was the easiest house of that derelict row to break into. It was, in fact, easy to get into, as Foxy had proved, as a test. Across the waste ground at the back of the house there was a small, accessible, and unboarded window, which led into a pantry. Foxy had nipped in and out and had reported that there was nothing to it and that the place was suitable as a retreat place.

  They would commandeer blankets and provisions from Bert’s own house. Foxy would help him to get in the pantry window, after nightfall, while Copper kept cave outside.

  “What’ll your mum say?” asked Copper dubiously. “She’ll raise hell when she finds you’ve run out on her, won’t she?”

  It was a thought which had occurred to Bert already. He was fond of his mother, and had no wish to cause her unnecessary anxiety.

  “I’ll leave a note to say we’ve gone to Battersea Pleasure Gardens and I’ll be back late. Not to sit up for me.”

  “Yes, but what about tomorrow?”

  “I’ll give you another note, to leave in the letter box early tomorrow. I’ll say—” Bert brooded a moment— “I’ll say I’ve run away to sea.”

  “Don’t be soft,” remarked Foxy. “Why not say you’ve gone to the moon on a rocket? Just about as likely.”

  “You pipe down, Foxy, me lad,” said Copper, who was apt unexpectedly to take Bert’s side. “When you have the nerve to stay all night in a haunted house, you can talk.”

  “Haunted?” said Bert, after a pause.