He Who Whispers Read Free Page A

a flicking motion of the fingers to someone who hovered outside.
    â€˜Dinner is served,’ he said.

CHAPTER 2
    T HE story told to them by Georges Antoine Rigaud – over the coffee, following an indifferent dinner – Miles Hammond was at first inclined to dismiss as a fable, a dream, an elaborate leg-pull. This was partly because of Professor Rigaud’s expression: one of portentous French solemnity, shooting little glances from one of his companions to the other, yet with a huge sardonic amusement behind everything he said.
    Afterwards, of course, Miles discovered that every word was true. But by that time …
    It was muffled and quiet in the little dining-room, with the four tall candles burning on the table as its only light. They had drawn back the curtains and opened the windows, to let in a little air on that stuffy night. Outside the rain still splashed, against a purplish dusk spotted with one or two lighted windows in the red-painted restaurant across the street.
    It formed a fitting background for what they were about to hear.
    â€˜Crime and the occult!’ Professor Rigaud had declared, flourishing his knife and fork. ‘These are the only hobbies for a man of taste!’ He looked very hard at Barbara Morell. ‘You collect, mademoiselle?’
    An eddying breeze, moist-scented, curled in through the open windows and made the candle-flames undulate. Moveing shadows were thrown across the girl’s face.
    â€˜Collect?’ she repeated.
    â€˜Criminal relics?’
    â€˜Good heavens, no!’
    â€˜There is a man in Edinburgh,’ said Professor Rigaud rather wistfully, ‘who has a pen-wiper made of human skin, from the body of Burke, the body-snatcher. Do I shock you? But as God is my judge’ – suddenly he chuckled, showing his gold tooth, and then became very serious again – ‘I could name you a lady, a very charming lady like yourself, who stole the headstone from the grave of Dougal, the Moat Farm murderer, at Chelmsford Prison; and has the headstone set up in her garden now.’
    â€˜Excuse me,’ said Miles. ‘But do all students of crime … well, carry on like that?’
    Professor Rigaud considered this.
    â€˜It is a blague, yes,’ he conceded. ‘But all the same it is amusing. As for myself, I will show you presently.’
    He said no more until the table was cleared and the coffee poured. Then, lighting a cigar with concentration, he hitched his chair forward and put his thick elbows on the table. His cane, of polished yellow wood which shone under the candle-light, was propped against his leg.
    â€˜Outside the little city of Chartres, which is some sixty-odd kilometres south of Paris, there lived in the year nineteen-thirty-nine a certain English family. You are perhaps familiar with Chartres?
    â€˜One thinks of the place as medieval, as all black stone and a dream of the past, and in a sense that is true. You see it in the distance, on a hill, amid miles of yellow grain-fields, with the unequal towers of the Cathedral rising up. You enter through the round-towers of the Porte Guillaume, where geese and chickens fly in front of your motor-car, and go up steep little cobbled streets to the Hotel of the Grand Monarch.
    â€˜At the foot of the hill winds the River Eure, with the old walls of the fortifications overhanging it, and willows drooping into the water. You see people walking on these walls, in the cool of the evening, where the peach-trees grow.
    â€˜On market-days – ouf! The noise of cattle is like the devil blowing horns. There are absurdities to buy, at lines of stalls where the vendors sound as loud as the cattle. There are’ – Professor Rigaud hesitated slightly – ‘superstitions here, as much a part of the soil as moss on rock. You eat the best bread in France, you drink good wine. And you say to yourself, “Ah! This is the place to settle down and write a