John Carr - The Plague Court Murders

There was a figure in the doorway.

"Indeed!" said Lady Benning harshly.

Her upper lip was pulled up. In contrast to the primness of the waved white hair and the black velvet band round her throat, her face was full of darkish wrinkles. The black eyes were on mine. She was leaning, incongruously, on an umbrella, and with this she abruptly made a gesture and struck the wall of the passage behind. "Come into the front room, you," she cried shrilly, "and ask which one of us killed Roger Darworth. . . . Oh, my God, James! James!" said Lady Benning, and suddenly began to cry.

VIII

WHICH ONE OF FIVE?

IN THE front room I faced five people.

For the moment the most curious study was the self-assured old lady breaking to pieces like the wax-flower placidness of her face. It was as though she had tumbled down and could not get up: and there existed a very real physical cause behind the mental. Either slightly lame, or afflicted as I judged with some slight paralytic weakness of the legs, Lady Benning remained a stately little figure (got up deftly into her Watteau marquise's role, as though to have her portrait painted) while she only sat in the chimney corner and nodded against her red cloak. But once she got up, and moved uncertainly, you saw only a decaying, spiteful, very bewildered, elderly woman, who had lost a beloved nephew. Such at least was my impression, though you sensed in her a more baffling quality than in any of the others.

She sat in the same chair as before, beside the smoky fire that had long ago gone out, under the six candles in the ruined room. Nor would she use a handkerchief; she sat with a hand pressed to her pouched and smeary eyes, her breast heaving, and would not speak. Major Featherton stood over her, glaring at me. Ted Latimer was on the other side of the fireplace, and he had a poker in his hand.

Yet to face these people down was so easy that you felt uncomfortable, for the most palpable thing in that room - standing behind each person's shoulder - was fear.

"Now, sir!" boomed Major Featherton, as though he would get down to business at once. But he stopped.

A rather imposing figure, the major, when seen at last in full light. He had that look of being tilted slightly backwards, compressed into a correct overcoat whose tailoring almost hid his paunch. His shiny, bald head (much at variance with the port-wine-colored flabby face, big nose, and jowls swelling over the collar as he spoke) was inclined on one side. One hand was oratorically bent behind his back; with the other he pulled at his white mustache. Pale blue eyes studied me from under grizzled brows that needed combing. He coughed. A curious, pacifying expression spread over his face, as though he were about to say, "Ahem!" At the back of all this hesitancy you perceived sheer bewilderment; and also something fundamentally nervous, honest, and solidly British. I expected him to burst out with: "Oh, dammit, let somebody else do the talking!"

Lady Benning drew a sobbing breath, and he put a hand gently on his shoulder.

"They tell us, sir, that Darworth's dead," he said, with an attempt at a growl. "Well, it's a bad business. A confoundedly bad business, I don't mind telling you. How did it happen?"

"He was stabbed," I said. "Out there in the stone house, as you know."

"With what?" Ted Latimer asked swiftly. "With Louis Playge's dagger?"

Ted had pulled out a chair with a quick gesture, and sat down with his legs straddling the back of it. He was trying to be very cool. His tie was disarranged, and there were smears of dirt at the edges of his carefully brushed, wiry, yellowish hair.

I nodded.

"Well, damn it, say something!" rasped the major. He brought his hand up from Lady Benning's shoulder, and put it down again more softly. "Come, now. None of us feel too pleasant about this. When the friend that Dean introduced, that fellow Masters, turned out to be nothing else than a police officer---“

Ted glared at Halliday, who was unconcernedly lighting a cigarette; but Ted met his sister's eye, and jerked his hand before his face as though he were brushing away a fly.

"-that," said the major, "was bad enough. It wasn't like you, Dean. It was rank violation. It was-"

"I should call it foresight, sir," Halliday interrupted. "Don't you think I was justified?"

Featherton opened and shut his mouth. "Oh, look here! I'm not up to all these tricks, confound it! I'm a plain man, and I like to know where I am. If the ladies will pardon me for saying so, that's the truth. I haven't approved of these goings-on, never did approve of 'em, and, by Gad, I never will!" He was considerably on edge, but he seemed to grow penitent as he glanced down at Lady Benning, and turned his tirade at me. "Now, come, sir. After all! I hope we all speak the same language here.

Lady Benning knows your sister." (He spoke with a sort of accusation). "What's more, Dean tells me you were connected with Department 3. You know, M.I.D. Why, confound it, I know your Chief there; the one you call Mycroft. Know him well. Surely you don't want us tangled up in any of the rotten mess that's bound to follow this?"

There was only one way to get these people to speak frankly. When I had finished explaining, the major cleared his throat.

"Good. Ah, good. Not bad, I mean. What you mean's this: You're not a policeman. You won't press any inquiries you think are absurd-about us. Hey? You'll try to help if that police officer, humph, gets gay ..."

I nodded. Marion Latimer was staring at me with a curious expression in her dark-blue eyes, as though she had remembered something.

She said in a clear voice: "And also you think the key to this affair lies in – in - what did you say? -some associate or association of Darworth aside from us. Say in the past ... "Rot!" said Ted, and let out a high laugh such as urchins give when they have smashed a window and run.

"That's what I meant. But before we can go on, one question must be answered by all of you, and answered frankly...."

"Ask, by all means," said the major.

I looked round the group. "Then can any of you honestly say now that he still believes Darworth was killed by a supernatural agency?"

There is, or used to be, a game called Truth. It is popular among adolescents, with an end towards drawing out all the giggling secrets; but a grown-up with a curious turn of mind will do well to encourage it sometimes among his own associates, and observe closely the result. Watch their eyes and hands, the way they form their sentences, the devious turn of their lies or else their shattering frankness; and much is to be learned of their natures.... After asking that question, I was reminded of nothing so much as a group of adolescents playing with an uneasy question in a game of Truth.

They looked at each other. Even Lady Benning had stiffened. Her jewel-gaudy hands were still pressed over her eyes, but she might have been peering out between the fingers; she began to tremble, then uttered what might have been a moan or a sob, and slid back against the gaudier red-lined cloak.

"NO!" said Major Featherton explosively.

It broke the tension. Halliday murmured, "Good man! Speak up, old girl. Banish the hobgoblins. Tell 'em all about it."

"I-I don't know," said Marion, with a dull and incredulous half-smile at the fireplace. She looked up. "I don't honestly know, but I don't think so. You see, Mr. Blake, you've got us into such a position that we shall look most awful fools if we say, `No.'- Wait! I'll put it another way. I don't know whether, or not I believe in the supernatural. I rather 'fancy I do. There's something in this house-" her eyes moved round quickly. "I-I haven't been myself, and there may be something terrible and unnatural here. But if you ask me whether I think Mr. Darworth is an impostor, the answer is YES! After hearing what that Dennis boy had to say... ." She shuddered.

"Then, my dear Miss Latimer," boomed the major, massaging his jaw, "why, in the name of heaven—“

"You see?" she said quietly, and smiled. "That's what I meant. I didn't like that man. I think I hated him. It was the way he talked, the manner he had; oh, I can't explain it, except that I've heard of people getting in the power of of doctors before. He was a kind of super-doctor who poisoned you so that " her eyes slid quickly to Halliday, and as quickly darted away, "so that: well, it's horrible to talk of, but - you could almost see maggots crawling on people you knew and loved! And the odd thing is that it's like a spell in the story-books. He's dead. And we're all free, as I wanted to be free."

Her cheeks were flushed, and her speech rapid to incoherence, Ted let out a whinny of laughter.

He said: "I say, angel, I shouldn't go on like that, you know. You're only providing motives for murder."

"Well, well," said Halliday, and took the cigarette out of his mouth. "Want your face knocked off, do you?"

Ted studied him. Ted was very much the young intellectual then, drawn back a little, supercilious, touching his sprouting mustache. He would have been ludicrous had it not been for the fighting fanaticism of his eyes.

"Oh, if it comes to that, old son, motives for all of us. With the possible exception of myself. And that's unfortunate, because I haven't much objection to being accused...." It was the very familiar aloof Chelsea strain, and I think he caught Halliday's slight grimace, for his face hardened; he went on rapidly: "Especially as they'll never be able to arrest anybody. Yes, I believed in Darworth, and I still do! It seems to me you're all doing a hell of a lot of shuffling and sliding, the moment someone says, `Coppers!' Let 'em come! I'm glad of this, in a way. It'll throw a demonstration of the truth at the whole world, and the morons who've always tried to block every bit of real scientific progress-" He swallowed hard. "All right, all right! Say I'm potty, but this will have demonstrated it to the world. Now isn't it worth a man's life and what's a man's life compared to scientific…”

"Yes," said Halliday. "You only seem to be interested in man's life after he's dead. As for the rest of it, I've heard all that poisonous nonsense before." He looked at the other sharply. "'By the way, what are you getting at, anyhow?"

Ted thrust out his neck. He tapped his finger slowly on the back of the chair. His head was wagging, and his face screwed up into a probably unintentional sneer.

"Only this, my boy. Simply this. We're not altogether without brains. We heard your policemen smashing down that door; we heard a good deal of what was said, and what's thought. . . . And until your Scotland Yard can tell us how Darworth was killed, I'll keep my own ideas."

He glanced across the hearth, as though carelessly, and his eyes narrowed. Inexplicably, we must all have experienced a sense of shock to see that Lady Benning was sitting up.

She was dry-eyed now, but so dull of face that the black-lace gown, all the elaborate deckings out of a, shell, became harsh travesty. On God knows what impulse-but I remembered it afterwards - Major Featherton bent over and settled the cape about her shoulders. With the red-lining gone, she became a somber part of the gloom. Only the bracelets on her arm glittered as she put her elbow on the arm of the chair, her flabby chin against her knuckles, and stared down as though at flames in the dead fire. She hunched her shoulders, drearily.

"Thank you, William," she said. "These courtesies-! Yes. Yes, I am better now."

Featherton said gruffly: "If anything's upset you, Anne,

"No, you won't, William." Her hand slid up as his big shoulder lifted. It was comedy, or tragedy, or whatever you like. "Ask Mr. Blake, or Dean, or Marion," she went on without lifting her eyes. "They know."

"You mean, Lady Benning," I said, "what Joseph told us?"

"In a way. Yes."

"Seriously, then: had you never suspected Darworth of being an impostor?"

We heard voices begin calling outside the house; a hail, somebody's answer, the clumping of footsteps coming nearer. A muffled voice at the front said: "Carry y'r own ruddy tripod, can'tcher? Were the 'ell? ..." Somebody replied, there was a mutter of mirth, and the footsteps clumped on round the side of the house. Lady Benning spoke.

"Suspected? We do not know Mr. Darworth was an impostor. If so, I am sure of one thing. . . . They are not impostors. They are real. He tampered with them, and they killed him."

There was a pause. She felt the atmosphere.

"I am an old woman, Mr. Blake," she said, looking up suddenly. "I had very little to make me happy. I never asked you into my life. But you came into it, with your - your great boots, and your bullyings of half-witted children like Joseph - and you trampled that little garden down. For the love of God, my friend, in the name of His mercy, do nothing more!"

She pressed her hands together, and turned away.

"Part of it, Lady Benning," I said, "would seem a very terrible gospel. Were you made happy to think, or did you really think, that your nephew could be possessed, and go amuck like a devil?"

For answer she regarded Halliday.

"You! Oh, my dear boy, I don't doubt you're happy. You're young, you're rich, you have a beautiful girl...." Lady Benning spoke with soft malevolence, turning out her wrist as she uttered each phrase, so that she sounded horribly like a burlesque Shylock. "You have health, and friends, and a quiet bed at night. Not like poor James, out there in the cold. Why shouldn't you worry and squirm a little? Why shouldn't that pretty doll, with her lips and her fine body, why shouldn't she sicken and worry her heart out? Do her good, instead of so much kissing. Why shouldn't I encourage it? . . . It wasn't you I worried about. It wasn't for you I wanted this house cleansed. It was for James. James must stay there in the cold until the foul thing is gone out of this house. Perhaps James is the foul thing---“

"Anne, my dear old friend!" said Major Featherton.

"Good God, this won't do.... "And now," Lady Benning went on, in a sharp but very

matter-of-fact tone, "Roger Darworth has cheated me. Very well. I only wish I had known it sooner."

I restrained Halliday, who was regarding his aunt with incredulous eyes, and he had started to say, "You encouraged-" I said quickly:

"Cheated you, Lady Benning?"

She hesitated, seeming to come to herself. "If he was an impostor, he cheated me. If not, he still failed to exorcise what is in this house. In either case, it slew him. He failed. And therefore he cheated me." Lady Benning lay back in her chair and commenced to laugh, in shuddering convulsions, as though she had made a hilariously witty reply. Then she wiped her eyes. "Ah, ah. I mustn't forget. Was there anything else you wanted to ask me, Mr. Blake?"

"Yes. Something I should like to ask everybody.... A week ago tonight, I am given to understand, there was an informal gathering at Major Featherton's flat. At this gathering, Mr. Darworth was persuaded to try automatic writing. Is that correct?"

The old lady turned and prodded at Featherton's coat.

"Didn't I tell you?" she demanded, in malevolent triumph. "Didn't I tell you, William? ... I knew it. When that police-officer came in here a while ago, and tried to bully us, he had a younger man with him. Another policeman, the one who took charge of Joseph. He didn't show his face to us, but I knew who it was. It was the police spy they sent to us, and we received as a friend."