John Carr - The Plague Court Murders

"Yes," said Masters, "yes. You may go." Suddenly he looked up. "Young Latimer - wait a bit!-young Latimer was the only one with a flashlight? Yours was broken; then Mr. Blake gave you his when we heard Miss Latimer calling in the passage?"

Halliday looked at him a moment, and then laughed. "Still suspicious of me, Inspector? Well, you're quite right to be. But, as it happens, I'm strictly innocent in the flashlight business. I gave that one to Ted, at his request. You should ask him, you know.:.. Well, good night." He hesitated, and walked over to me, putting out his hand. "Good night, Mr. Blake. I'm only sorry I dragged you into this mess. But I didn't know, you see. By God, we did start a hare, didn't we?"

... They went out the back door, and we remained in our separate and foolish positions; conscious of a city waking to daylight all around, and only the ashes of a haunted house. Presently McDonnell came over to the work-bench, beginning to sort out the penciled notes he had brought in.

"Well, sir?" Masters addressed me. "What about it? Brain working?"

I said that it wasn't, and added: "Of itself, the conflicting testimony may not be so inexplicable. That is, three people said there was somebody moving about in the room, and two people said there wasn't. But the two people who denied it, Lady Benning and Ted Latimer, were the ones who might be so rapt in concentration or prayer, or whatever it was, that they wouldn't hear it...."

"Yet they all heard the bell fast enough," said Masters. "And it didn't ring at all loudly, I'll swear."

"Yes. That's the part that sticks. . . . Oh, admittedly somebody was lying. And it was as expert lying as we'll probably ever listen to."

Masters got up. "I'm not going to hash the thing over now," he snapped. "Not with a dead brain. I'll forget even the great big snag in the business that's worse than people who can walk over soft mud without leaving footprints. I'll put it out of my mind. And yet I've a hunch - a hunch - I don't know - what is a hunch, anyway?"

"Well, sir," said McDonnell, "I've generally discovered that a hunch is what you call an idea that you're afraid is wrong. I've been having them all evening. For 'instance, it struck me-"

"I don't want to hear it. Lummy, I'm sick of the business! I want a cup of strong coffee. And some sleep. And - wait a minute, Bert. What about those reports you've got? If there's anything interesting, let's have it now. Otherwise let it wait."

"Right you are, sir. Surgeon's report: `Death of a stab wound, made by the sharp instrument submitted for inspection-that's the L.P. dagger-penetrating through...."'

"Where is the blasted thing, by the way?" interrupted Masters, struck with an idea. "I shall have to take it along. Did you pick it up?"

"No. Bailey was photographing it on the table; they set up the table after we'd taken the measurements and shot the scene as it was. It's probably still out on the table. By the way, its blade had been ground to a needle-point sharpness. Doesn't sound like a ghost there."

"Right. We'll pick it up. I don't want our 'man with his back turned’ messing about with it again. Never mind the doctor's report. What about fingerprints?"

McDonnell scowled. "Not a print on the dagger of any kind, Williams says. He says it had been wiped clean, or the chap used gloves; that was only to be expected.... Otherwise, the whole place is alive with 'em. He counted two separate sets of prints aside from Darworth's. The photos will be around this morning. Also a lot of footprints. The place was dusty. No marks in the blood, though, except half a footprint that probably belongs to Mr. Blake."

"Yes. We shall want to go over this house here, and try to match up the prints; take care of it. What j'you get out of his pockets?"

"Usual lot. Nothing enlightening. No papers of any kind, in fact." McDonnell took from his pocket a folded sheet of newspaper, wrapped round a small collection of articles. "Here it is. Bunch of keys, notecase, watch and chain, some loose silver: that's the. lot.... There was just one other funny thing...."

Masters caught sharply at the other's uncertainty. "Well?"

"The constable noticed it when we were raking out the fire, to see whether somebody might have got down the chimney. It was glass, sir. In the fire. Big fragments like a jar or bottle, maybe; but they were so splintered and burnt and softened out of shape that you couldn't tell.... Besides, it might have been there some time."

"Glass?" repeated Masters, and stared. `But wouldn't it melt?"

"No. It bursts and splinters, that's all. I thought perhaps-"

The inspector grunted. "Whisky-bottle, maybe. Dutch-courage for Darworth. I shouldn't worry about it."

"Might have been, of course," admitted McDonnell. But he was not satisfied. His fingers tapped his pointed chin, and his eyes roved about the room. "Still, it's dashed funny, though, isn't it? I mean, chucking a bottle in the fire when you've finished with it: hardly a natural action, is it, sir? Did you ever see anybody do it? It struck me that—“

"Stow it, Bert," said Masters, dragging out his words and making a wry face. "We've had plenty. Come along. 'We'll have a last look at the place in daylight, and then we'll dear out."

A cool wind blew drowsily on our eyelids as we went down into the yard. The gray light was uncertain and murky as though we saw the whole place under water; it looked larger than I had imagined it last night, and must have covered a good half-acre. Set down in the midst of decaying brick buildings, gaunt and crooked against the dawn, with their blind windows staring into it, this yard was uncanny in its desolation. You felt that no churchbells, or street-organs, or any homely, human sound, could ever penetrate it.

A brick wall perhaps eighteen feet high dosed it round on three sides of a rough oblong. There was a few dying plane trees straggling beside it, with an ugly coquettish appearance like the wreaths and Cupids on the cornice of the big house, as though they were dying in the mopping, mincing postures of the seventeenth century. In one corner was a disused well, and the crooked foundations of what might once have been a dairy. But it was the little stone house, standing out in the center and alone towards the rear wall, that carried the most evil suggestion.

It was blackish gray and secret, gaping with its smashed door. On the pitch of the roof were heavy curved tiles that might once have been red; the chimney was squat black, with a toppling chimney-pot like a rakish hat. Not far away grew the dead, crooked tree.

That was all. The stiff sea of mud about it, and only the broad squashy lines of tracks where many people had tramped up to the door in the same path. From this path, just two sets of prints - Masters' and mine-straggled close to the wall of the house towards the window at which I had held Masters up for his first sight of Darworth dead.

In silence we walked all around the house, keeping to the margin of the yard. The puzzle grew more monstrous and incredible as we stared at every blank side. Yet I have not overlooked, omitted, or misstated anything, and all was exactly as it seemed to be: a stone box, with door and windows solidly inaccessible, no tricks of secret entrances, and no footprints near it anywhere before Masters and I had gone out. That is literal truth.

It remained, to complete it, only for Masters to snatch at the only remaining lead, and to have that swept away also. We had got round to the other side of the house - the left side, looking towards it from the back door - and Masters stopped. He stared at the blighted tree, then back at the wall.

"Look here-" he said. The voice sounded strange and hoarse in that dead-silent place. "That tree. I know it won't explain the rest, but it might explain the absence of footprints ... a very agile man who got on to that wall might swing from the wall to the tree, and then from the tree to the house. It could be done, you know; they're not very far apart. . .

McDonnell nodded. He said grimly: "Yes, Sir. Bailey and I thought of that too. It was one of the first things we did think of, until somebody got a ladder round at the side, and I climbed up on the wall and walked round and tried to test it." He pointed up. "You see that broken branch? That's where I damned near broke my neck. The tree's dead, sir. It's as rotten as pulp. I'm fairly light myself, and I didn't do much more than touch it. It wouldn't support any weight. Try it for yourself.... You see, the tree has a different connotation."

Masters turned round. "Oh, for Lord's sake quit being superior!" he said raspingly. "What do you mean, connotation'?"

"Well, I was wondering why they'd cut down the rest of 'em, and left this one here. . . ." Pressing a hand over his eyes, the other looked puzzled and disturbed. His bleary gaze was turned on the ground at the foot of the tree: that slight plateau of which the house was the center. "Then I tumbled to it. That tree is where our good friend Louis Playge rests six feet under. I suppose they didn't want to disturb him. Funny, about superstitions. . . ."

Masters had strode out over the unmarked ground and reached up to test the tree. He was so irritated that his yank splintered off a branch altogether.

"Yes. It's funny, right enough. Ah, bloody lot of good you are, Bert!" He ripped off the branch and flung it on the ground; then his voice rose querulously: "Stow it, will you, or I'll heave this thing at you! This chap's been murdered. We've got to find out how, and if you keep on gibbering about superstitions-" "I admit it isn't much good for telling us how the murderer reached the house. But, on the other hand, I thought maybe--"

Masters said, "Bah," and turned to me. "There's got to be some way, you know," he insisted with a sort of dull persuasiveness. "Look here, can we be sure there weren't any footprints going out towards the place before we came? There's a terrible mess, you know, now, going up to the door.... "We can," I said with conviction.

He nodded. In silence we came round again to the front. The house kept its secret. In that drugged hour of the morning, it was as though we were not three practical men out of a sharp-eyed age; but that the old house had been recreated again, and that, if we looked over the boundary wall, we should see the doors of houses painted with a red cross below the words, "Lord, have mercy upon us." When Masters wormed his way through the shattered doorway into the gloom of the place, my thick head could only picture what he might see inside.

I tried to shake off these fancies as McDonnell and I stood outside, the smoke of our breath going up in the still air.

McDonnell said: "I don't think I shall get a look-in on this business. I'm district, you know; Vine Street; and the Yard will probably handle it. Still...." He whirled round. "Hullo! I say, sir, what's up?"

There had been a sound of thrashing about inside. It so fitted in with my distorted fancies that for a moment I did not look. Masters was breathing hard, and the beam of his flashlight darted about. The next instant he was in the doorway, very quiet.

He said: "It's a rum thing, but you know how you get a verse or a jingle or something stuck in your head, so that you can't get it out? - and you keep on repeating it all day, and try to stop yourself, but a little while later you forget, and you find yourself saying it again? Eh? Just so. Well-"

I said: "Stop babbling, and tell us "

"Ah. Yes." His head moved round heavily. "What I've been repeating to myself-don't know why; sort of consolation, maybe; repeating all night to myself-`Last straw that broke the camel's back.' Just like that. Over and over.

'Last straw that broke the camel's back.' By God, somebody'll pay for this!" he snapped, and brought his fist down on the iron bar. "Yes, you've guessed it. Wait for the newspapers, now. `Spare man with his back turned.. . Somebody's got that dagger again, that's what! It's not here. It's pinched - gone.... D'you think they want to use it again?"

He looked rather wildly from one to the other of us.

Nobody said anything for a full minute. Suddenly McDonnell started to laugh, but it was a sort of laughter exactly like Masters' mood.

"There goes my job," said McDonnell.

Then he walked away in silence, away from the place that had the look of a ballroom the morning after a party. There were pinkish hints in the sky now, and the dome of St. Paul's was looming out purple-gray against thin shreds of light. Masters kicked a tin can out of his way. A motor horn hooted raucously in Newgate Street, and the milk-carts were already bumping down below the gilt figure of Justice on the cupola of the Old Bailey.

XIII

MEMORIES IN WHITEHALL

IT WAS past six o'clock when I got back to my flat, and two o'clock in the afternoon before I was roused out of loggish slumber by somebody drawing the curtains and talking about breakfast.

That I had become in some measure a celebrity was evident from the presence of Popkins, autocrat of the Edwardian House's domestic staff. He stood at the foot of my bed, all chin and buttons like a Prussian junior-officer, with several newspapers under his arm. He did not comment on these newspapers, seeming to imply that they were not there at all when he insinuated them into my hands; but he was very careful about how I wanted my eggs, bacon, and bath.

Anybody who was in England at the time will remember the terrific, the enormous and ghoulish splash that was caused by "The Plague Court Horror." At the Press Club I have been informed that from a newspaper point of view this compound of murder, mystery, the supernatural, and a strong dash of sex, missed not a single element in Fleet Street's recipe for the ideal dish. More, it promised, bitter controversy for some time to come. Tabloid newspapers, in the American style, were not then so common as they are now, but a tabloid was first on the sheaf of papers Popkins gave me. Although the story had broken too late for the early editions, beyond brief glare in Stop-Press, the noon editions broke their front pages open with a double column of leaded type.

Sitting up in bed, on a gray drizzly morning with the electric light turned on, I read all the papers and tried to realize that this was real. And it was difficult. There was the prosaic sound of water running for my bath; watch, keys, and money laid out on the bureau as usual; the noise of cars bumping down the narrow hill of Bury Street, and the rain.

Pictures occupied the entire first page, which was headed: PHANTOM KILLER STILL HAUNTS PLAGUE COURT!

In an oval round the center-piece were ranged photographs of everybody (obviously old ones from the Morgue). One of those faces, which was set in a murderous leer, I recognized as my own. Lady Benning looked shy and virginal in a whalebone collar and cartwheel hat; Major Featherton's, in full army regalia, was a curious half-picture which made him look as though he were holding up and admiring a bottle of beer; Halliday was pictured as incautiously descending some steps with his head turned sideways and his foot poised in the air; Marion's alone was a passable likeness. There was no picture of Darworth, but inside the oval the artist had spread himself on a lively sketch intended to represent his murder at the hand of a hooded phantom with a knife.