Patricia Carlon - Whispering Wall (Soho Crime)

THE WHISPERING WALL

by Patricia Carlon

Published by: Soho Press, Inc., New York, NY.

Copyright 1969 by Patricia Carlon

"Patricia Carlon poses a stunning puzzle."

--The New York Times Book Review

Sarah Oatland is confined to her bed by a stroke. She is paralyzed, unable to speak, and her greedy relatives, the vulgar sly nurse, unsympathetic doctor and embarrassed visitors assume that she is comatose, a vegetable.

But Sarah can hear everything and her keen intelligence makes her helplessness and loss of privacy all the harder to bear. Then, just as she is regaining the power to open and close her eyes, she overhears a plot to commit murder. And it is up to her to foil the plotters and to save her own life.

In the tradition of Ruth Rendell and Patricia Highsmith, Patricia Carlon, deemed one of the best Australian crime writers by the Times Literary Supplement, gives us a tale of claustrophobic tension and mounting terror set in the placid suburbs of Sydney.

Praise for Patricia Carlon

"Patricia Carlon must be regarded as one of the greatest exponents of the suspense novel, her greatest asset being the ability to build such a gripping and truly terrifying story on such a plausible and all-too-easily imagined background."

--Illustrated Chronicle

"A suspense story of infernal cunning ... Ms. Carlon, an established mystery author in her native Australia, lures the reader down the garden path."

--The New York Times Book Review

"Australian Carlon invites comparison to Patricia Highsmith, Ruth Rendell in her Barbara Vine mode ... the tension is almost palpable, and the solution is a triumph of logic

and narrative pitch."

--Publishers Weekly

"Australian writer Carlon presents a cunningly understated puzzle with a particularly deft solution."

--Kirkus Reviews

"Carlon's story is not the usual action thriller. Her focus is far more subtle ... An understated, absorbing, intelligent novel."

--Booklist

"Patricia Carlon develops her riddle with considerable cunning, rounding it off with a just and plausible solution."

--London Sunday Times

Patricia Carlon was born in Wa)a Wa)a in 1927. She now lives in Sydney. Her numerous suspense novels have been published in six countries. This is the first U.s. publication of The Whispering Wall.

ALSO AVAILABLE BY PATRICIA CARLON

The Souvenir

THE WHISPERING WALL

Sometimes Sarah imagined that death was behind the heavy dark doors of the corner wardrobe, watching her with one bright, knowing, watchful eye. That was in the nights, when light struck through an unprotected corner of the window, on to the big round keyhole, sparking it into brightness, a round bright circle winking at her from the dark.

Then she would wonder what Bragg would say to the imagining, and she was glad there was no chance that in some unguarded, lonely moment she would let out her fears of the night and see the pale eyes reflect the pity in the oozing voice.

Lying there with nothing to do but think, she would remember odd snatches from her life and from the lives of others; trifles she had never remembered before--like a tartan sash lost and grieved over when she was four; the death of a canary; a school lesson forgotten; hot summer Sundays and a young clergyman stammering over his sermons, conscious his audience was weighing him against his predecessor and finding him wanting. Hot summer Sundays, Sarah remembered, and remembered, too, her resentment at being cooped up in the crowded church with all of summer--the open paddocks, the song of cicadas, the cool velvet of brown creek waters--waiting for her outside, while she had to sit in a starched cotton frock listening to a stammering voice.

Lying there, fifty years and a thousand miles from the paddocks and the child of ten, Sarah remembered odd bits and pieces of the sermons. She didn't want to because remembrance made her uncomfortable as she heard again the stammering youthful voice speaking of people and hatred and sin.

It had made her feel guilty, that remembrance, because she hated Bragg so badly, from the soft oozing voice to the plump hands, and it wasn't fair or just that hate, Sarah knew.

It was actually a terrible sin to hate Bragg, who was competent and thought herself kind and comforting and a credit to the nursing profession.

Yet how, Sarah fretted, could one feel anything but hate for a person who invaded every privacy, who knew all about you, or thought she did, and discussed that knowledge over your recumbent quiet body; who called you "poor dear" and

referred to you over and over again as being laid out like a fish on a slab.

It was at those moments that Sarah acutely regretted her lost voice. She would have liked to have told Bragg concisely and quite crudely, what she, Sarah, thought of that beastly phrase; but at other times, in the lonely dark times, she was glad she could no longer speak, or it would all tumble out to Bragg's receptive ear, to be later repeated to the doctor and old friends--about the wardrobe and the bright knowing watching eye in the night, and a hundred and one other things better unsaid.

Sarah could never think of the woman except as simply Bragg. Not even as Sister Bragg, or Nurse Bragg, and certainly not as

Cornelia, though on that first morning that Sarah had become aware of the world again Bragg had smiled down at her, plump hand patting Sarah's own, and had said, "Hello, dear. Isn't that nice that you're awake at last. I'm Cornelia

Bragg, dear. Just think of me as Cornelia.

All my friends do." And then pity had clouded the pale eyes and she had turned to the doctor and oozed in her thick, syrupy tones, "Not a blink, doctor. Do you think she hears? She's laid out like a fish on a slab, with as much life to her, poor dear."

Sarah hated remembering that, the first time she had heard that phrase. It reminded her how the knowledge had crept on her, then burst on her, like a terrifying flood, that she could no longer speak or move--that her mind was a prisoner in something inert, that was no longer her possession to use as she willed; that she was, as Bragg claimed, a mere lifeless fish on a slab, laid out for inspection and probing by anyone who chose to come.

There was only the book to cling to. Sarah couldn't remember how long ago it had been that she had read it, but it had been about a person in her own condition--paralysed of body and voice by one savage unheralded stroke.

It had spoken of the victim's body as feeling heavy as lead. Sarah would have liked to have written to the author of that and told him he didn't know what he had been talking about, because in her particular state there was a thistledown lightness about her body. You couldn't make thistledown butter bread, or spoon up cereal or do high kicks. Sometimes Sarah amused herself with the idea of Bragg's expression if her patient in some

way managed a sudden high kick in the bed, but thistledown didn't do anything except lie and wait for something or someone to move it somewhere else.

There was something else Sarah remembered about that book--remembered and clung to in desperate hope. The victim of that unheralded stroke had recovered in the end. Oh, not completely, but enough. She couldn't remember if it had been a leg or an arm that had continued to fail him, but whatever it was it had been a trifle beside the main point--that the rest of him came back to movement and living.

Whenever Bragg, or one of the visitors who came and peered at Sarah and clucked over her, had been particularly trying, Sarah would remember the book and think only of the pleasant time when she was once again Mrs Sarah Oatland, and not just a fish on a slab, to be peered at by every comer and labelled as worthless, or worse, a nuisance.