The Plague Court Murders Read online

  Then Sergeant Parker had what he can only describe as a “queer feeling.” He looked up. And, though he had thought there was nobody else in the room:

  “There was a gentleman standing at the door of the cell over there, with his back to me, looking in.

  “I can’t describe him, except that he was very lean, and had darkish clothes on. He seemed to be moving his head slowly, and sort of jerkily, as though he wanted to take a good look at the cell but had trouble with his neck. I wondered how he had got there without my hearing and supposed he had come through the other door. I went back to my paper again. But I kept getting that queer feeling; so, to satisfy myself, just before all the children came in, I went over and looked into the cell.

  “First I couldn’t tell what was wrong, and then it struck me: that knife, hanging up over the effigy, was missing. Of course, the man was gone, and I knew he had got it, and I reported it.”

  Sir Richard Meade-Browne, curator of the museum, commented later:

  “I trust you will broadcast, through the columns of your newspaper, an appeal for public cooperation to stop this vandalism of valuable relics.”

  The dagger, Sir Richard stated, was listed as the gift of J.G. Halliday, Esq., and was dug up in 1904 on the grounds of a property belonging to him. It is conjectured to have been the property of one Louis Playge, Common Hangman of the Borough of Tyburn in the years 1663-65. Being of doubtful authenticity, however, it was never exhibited as such.

  No trace of the thief has been found. Detective-Sergeant McDonnell, of Vine Street, is in charge.

  Now all this was, if you will, a journalist’s stunt; a penny-a-liner’s way of making copy on a dull day. I read it first standing in the lobby of the club, after I had telephoned to Masters, and then I wondered whether I ought to show it to Halliday.

  But I put it into his hands when I returned to the smoking-room, and watched his face while he read it.

  “Steady!” I said. For the freckles began to start out against his changing face as he read it; then he got up uncertainly, looked at me for a moment, and threw the paper into the fire.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” he said. “You needn’t worry. This only relieves my mind. After all—this is human, isn’t it? I was worrying about something else. This man Darworth, this medium, is behind it; and the plan, whatever it is, is at least human. The suggestion in that blasted article is absurd. What’s the man trying to say?—that Louis Playge came back after his own knife?”

  “Masters is coming,” I said. “Don’t you think it would be better if you told us something about it?”

  He shut his jaws hard. “No. You made a promise, and I’ll hold you to it. I won’t tell you—yet. When we start out for the infernal place, I’ll stop by at my flat and get you something which will explain a good deal; but I don’t want you to see it now … Tell me something. They say that a soul on the lower plane, a malevolent one, is always watchful and always cunning. That this one mass of dead evil is always waiting for the opportunity to take possession of a living body, and change the weak brain for its own, just as it infests a house. Do you think, then, that the clot could take possession …?”

  He hesitated. I can still see him standing in the firelight, a curious deprecating smile on his face, but a fierce stare in his red-brown eyes.

  “You’re talking rot now,” I said sharply. “And you’ve confused your facts. Take possession! Of what?”

  “Of me,” said Halliday quietly.

  I said what he needed was not a ghost-breaker, but a nerve-specialist. Then I dragged him off to the bar and saw that he swallowed a couple of whiskies. He was submissive; he even achieved a sort of satirical jollity. When we returned to the newspaper article, as we did again and again, he seemed again his old, lazy, amused self.

  Still, it was a relief to see Masters. We found Masters standing in the Visitors’ Room: large and rather portly, with his bland shrewd face, his sedate dark overcoat, and his bowler held against his breast as though he were watching a flag-procession go by. His grizzled hair was brushed carefully to hide the bald spot, his jaw looked heavier and his expression older since I had last seen him—but his eyes were young. Masters suggests the Force, though only slightly: something in the clump of his walk, the way his eyes go sharply from face to face, but there is none of the peering sourness we associate with Public Protectors. I could see that Halliday immediately unbent and felt at ease before his practical solidity.

  “Ah, sir,” he said to Halliday, after the introductions; “and you’re the one who wants a ghost laid?” This time he spoke as though he had been asked to install a radio. He smiled. “Mr. Blake’ll tell you I’m interested. Always have been. Now, about this house in Plague Court.”

  “You know all about it, I see,” said Halliday.

  “We-ell,” said Masters, putting his head on one side, “I know a little. Let me see. It came into possession of your family a hundred-odd years ago. Your grandfather lived there until the eighteen-seventies; then he moved out, quite suddenly, and refused to go back … And it’s been a white elephant ever since, which none of your people have ever been able to let or sell. Taxes, sir, taxes! Bad.” Masters’ mood seemed to change—smoothly, but with a compelling persuasion. “Now, Mr. Halliday, come! You’re good enough to say I can give you a little help. So I know you won’t mind returning the favor. Strictly unofficially, of course. Eh?”

  “Depends. But I think I can promise that much.”

  “Just so, just so. I take it you’ve seen the paper today?”

  “Ah!” murmered Halliday, grinning. “The return of Louis Playge; is that what you mean?”

  Inspector Masters returned the smile, blandly. He lowered his voice. “Well, as man to man, now, can you think of anybody—anybody you know, perhaps—any real flesh-and-blood person—who might be interested in lifting that dagger? That’s my question, Mr. Halliday. Eh?”

  “It’s an idea,” Halliday admitted. Perching himself on the edge of a table, he seemed to debate something in his mind. Then he looked at Masters with shrewd inspiration. “First off, I’ll give you a counter-question, Inspector. Do you know one Roger Darworth?”

  Not a muscle moved in the other’s face, but he seemed pleased.

  “Possibly you know him, Mr. Halliday?”

  “Yes. But not so well as my aunt, Lady Benning. Or Miss Marion Latimer, my fiancée, or her brother, or old Featherton. Quite a circle. Personally, I am definitely anti-Darworth. But what can I do? You can’t argue; they only smile on you gently and say you don’t understand.” He lit a cigarette and twitched out the match; his face looked sardonic and ugly. “I was only wondering whether Scotland Yard happened to know something of him? Or that red-headed kid of his?”

  Those two exchanged a glance, and spoke without uttering a word. In words Masters only answered, carefully: “We know nothing whatever against Mr. Darworth. Nothing whatever. I have met him; a very amiable gentleman. Very amiable, nothing ostentatious. Nothing claptrap, if you know what I mean …”

  “I know what you mean,” agreed Halliday. “In fact, during her more ecstatic moments, Aunt Anne describes the old charlatan as ‘saint-like.’ ”

  “Just so,” said Masters, nodding. “Tell me, though. Hum! Excusing delicate questions and all, should you describe either of the ladies as at all … hurrum?”

  “Gullible?” Halliday interpreted the strange noise Masters had produced from some obscure depth in his throat. “Good Lord, no! Quite the contrary. Aunt Anne is one of those little old ladies who look soft, and actually are honey and steel-wire. And Marion–well, she is Marion, you see.”

  “Exactly so,” agreed Masters, nodding again.

  Big Ben was striking the half hour as the porter got us a taxi, and Halliday told the man to drive to an address in Park Lane; he said he wanted to get something from his flat. It was chilly, and still raining. The black streets were adazzle with split reflections of lights.

  Presently we pulled up outside one of those n
ew, white-stone, green-and-nickel apartment houses (which look somehow like modernistic book-cases) sprouting up amid the sedateness of Park Lane. I got out and paced up and down under the brightly lit canopy while Halliday hurried inside. The rain was blowing over out of the dark Park; and—I don’t know how to describe it—faces looked unreal. I was tormented by that sharp, bald image that had been described in the newspaper: a lean man with his back turned, peering into the model of the condemned cell, and moving his head slowly. It seemed all the more horrible because the attendant had referred to him as a “gentleman.” When Halliday tapped my shoulder from behind, I almost jumped. He was carrying a flat package wrapped in brown paper and tied with twine, which he put into my hands.

  “Don’t open it now. It’s some facts or fancies concerning one Louis Playge,’ he said. He was buttoned up in the thin waterproof he affected in all weathers, with his hat pulled over one eye. Also, he was smiling. He gave me a powerful flashlight, Masters being already provided with one; and, when he climbed into the cab beside me, I could feel the pressure of what I thought was another in his side-pocket. I was wrong: it was a revolver.

  It is not difficult to talk lightly of horrors when you are in the West End, but I give you my word I was uneasy when we got out among the scattered lights. The tires were singing drowsily on wet streets; and I felt that I had to talk.

  “You won’t tell me,” I said, “anything about Louis Playge. But I imagine it wouldn’t be difficult to reconstruct his story, from the account in the newspaper.”

  Masters only grunted, and Halliday prompted: “Well?”

  “The conventional one,” I said. “Louis was the hangman, and dreaded as such. The knife, let’s say, was the one he used for cutting down his—guests … How’s that for a beginning?”

  Halliday answered, flatly: “As it happens, you’re wrong on both points. I wish it were as simple and conventional as that. What is terror, anyway? What is the thing that you come on all of a sudden, as though you’d opened a door; that turns you tipsy-cold in the stomach and makes you want to run blind some-where, anywhere, to escape the touch of it?—but you can’t because you’re limp as pulp, and—”

  “Come!” Masters said gruffly, out of his corner. “You talk as though you’d seen something.”

  “I have.”

  “Ah! Just so. And what was it doing, Mr. Halliday?”

  “Nothing. It was just standing at the window, looking in at me … But you were talking about Louis Playge, Blake. He wasn’t a hangman. He didn’t have the courage to be—although I believe he did seize their legs sometimes, at the hangman’s command, when they’d been twirling too long on the rope. He was a sort of hangman’s toady; and held the—the instruments when there was a drawing-and-quartering case; and washed up the refuse afterwards.”

  My throat felt a little dry. Halliday turned to me.

  “You were wrong about the dagger. It wasn’t exactly a dagger, you see; at least, it wasn’t used for that purpose until the last. Louis invented it for the hangman’s labors. The newspaper account didn’t describe the blade: the blade is round, about the thickness of a lead pencil, and coming to a sharp point. In short, like an awl. Well, can you imagine what he used it for?”

  “No.”

  The cab slowed down and stopped, and Halliday laughed. Pushing back the glass slide, the driver said: “ ’Ere’s the corner o’ Newgate Street, guv’nor. Now what?”

  We paid him off and stood for a moment or two looking about us. The buildings all looked lofty and distorted, as they do in dreams. Far behind us there was a hazy glow from Holborn Viaduct; we could hear only a thin piping of night-traffic, and the lonely noise of the rain. Leading the way, Halliday struck up Giltspur Street. Almost before I was aware we had left the street, I found myself going down a narrow and sticky passage between brick walls.

  They call it “claustrophobia,” or some such fancy name; but a man likes to be pressed down into a narrow space only when he is sure what he is shut up with. Sometimes you imagine you hear somebody talking, which is what happened then. Halliday stopped short in that high tunnel—he was ahead, I followed him, and Masters came last—and we all stopped, in our own echoes.

  Then Halliday switched on his electric torch, and we moved on. The beam found only the dingy walls, the puddles in the pavement, one of which gave a sudden plop as a stray raindrop struck it from the overhanging eaves. Ahead I could see an elaborate iron gate standing wide open. We all moved softly; I don’t know why. Possibly because there seemed such an absolute hush in the desolation of the house before us. Something seemed to be impelling us to move faster; to get inside those high brick walls; something drawing us on and playing with us. The house—or what I could see of it—was made of heavy, whitish blocks of stone, now blackened with the weather. It had almost a senile appearance, as of a brain gone, but its heavy cornices were carven with horrible gayety in Cupids and roses and grapes: a wreath on the head of an idiot. Some of its windows were shuttered, some patched with boards.

  At the rear, the wall rose and broadened round a vast back court. It was a desolation of mud, into which refuse had been thrown. Far at the rear of the yard, the moonlight showed a detached structure: a small, oblong house of heavy stone, like a dilapidated smokehouse. The little windows were heavily grated; it stood out among the ruins of the yard, and there was a crooked tree growing near it.

  Following Halliday, we went to a weedy brick path to the carven porch over the front door. The door itself was more than ten feet high, and had a corroded knocker still hanging drunkenly from one bolt. Our guide’s light played over the door; it winked back the damp, the swellings in the oak, the cuts where people had hacked their initials in the senility and ruin of Plague Court …

  “The door is open,” said Halliday.

  Inside, somebody screamed.

  We met many horrors in this mad business, but none, I think, that took us so off-balance. It was a real voice, a human voice; yet it was as though the old house itself had screamed, like a doddering hag, at Halliday’s touch. Masters, breathing hard, started to lunge past me. But it was Halliday who flung the door open.

  In the big musty hall inside, light was coming out of a door to the left. I could see Halliday’s face in that light; damp and set, and absolutely steady, as he stared into that room. He did not raise his voice.

  “What the devil is going on here?” he demanded.

  CHAPTER III

  What any of us expected to see, I do not know. Something diabolic; possibly the lean man with his face turned. But that was not to occur just yet.

  Masters and I came round on either side of Halliday, so that we must have seemed absurdly like a guard. We saw a large, rather lofty room; a ruin of past splendor, that smelt like a cellar. Its wall-paneling had been ripped away, exposing the stone; above it rotted what might once have been white satin, sagging in black peelings, and puffy with spiders’-webs. The mantelpiece alone remained: stained and chipped, a thin height of stone scroll-work. In the vast fireplace burnt a very small and smoky fire. Strung along the hood of the mantelpiece were half-a-dozen candles burning in tall brass holders. They flickered in the damp, showing above the mantelpiece, decaying fragments of wallpaper that had once been purple and gold.

  There were two occupants of the room—both women. It added a sort of witchlike eeriness to the place. One of them sat near the fire, half risen out of the chair. The other, a young woman in her middle twenties, had turned round sharply to look at us; her hand was on the sill of one of the tall shuttered windows towards the front.

  Halliday said: “Good God! Marion—”

  And then she spoke in a strained voice, very clear and pleasant, but only a note removed from hysteria. She said:

  “So it’s—it is you, Dean? I mean, it’s really you?”

  It struck me as a strange way of wording an obvious question, if that was what she really meant to imply. It meant something else to Halliday.

  “Of course it is,” he
said, in a sort of bark. “What did you expect? I’m still—me. I’m not Louis Playge. Not just yet.”

  He stepped into the room, and we followed him. Now, it was a curious thing, but the moment we crossed that threshold, I felt the lightening of a pressing, crowding, almost suffocating, feeling which was present in the air of the entrance-hall. We all went in quickly, and looked at the girl.

  Marion Latimer stayed motionless, a tense figure in the candlelight; and the shadow seemed to tremble at her feet. She had that thin, classic, rather cold type of beauty which makes face and body seem almost angular. Her hair was set in dark-gold waves close to the somewhat long head; her eyes were dark blue, glazed now with a preoccupied and somehow disturbing quality; the nose short, the mouth sensitive and determined. … She stood there crookedly, almost as though she were lame. One hand was thrust deep into the pocket of the brown tweed coat wrapped about her thin body; as she watched us, the other hand left the window-sill and pulled the collar close round her neck. They were fine, thin, wiry hands.

  “Yes. Yes, of course …” she muttered. She essayed a smile. She raised a hand to brush her forehead, and then caught her coat close again. “I—I thought I heard a noise in the yard. So I looked out through the shutter. There was a light on your face, just for a second. Absurd of me. But how did you come to be—how …?”

  Some influence was about the woman: an emotional repression, a straining after the immaterial, a baffled and baffling quality that sometimes makes spinsters and sometimes hellions. It was a quality of vividness, of the eyes or the body or the square line of the jaw. She disturbed you; that is the only word I can think of.

  “But you shouldn’t have come here,” she said. “It is dangerous—tonight.”

  A voice from the fireside spoke softly, without emotion.

  “Yes. It is dangerous.”

  We turned. … She was smiling, the little old lady who sat near the dull and smoky fire. She was very modish. Bond Street had coiffed her elaborate white hair; there was a black velvet band round her throat, where the flesh had begun to darken and sag. But the small face, which suggested wax flowers, was unwrinkled except round the eyes, and it was highly painted. The eyes were gentle—and hard. Though she smiled at us, her foot was tapping the floor slowly. She had obviously been shaken at our entrance; her jeweled hands, lying limp along the arms of the chair, were twisting and upturning as though to begin a gesture; and she was trying to control her breathing. You have read, doubtless, of people who are supposed to resemble eighteenth-century French marquises by Watteau. Lady Anne Benning looked like a thoroughly modern, sharp-witted old lady got up to resemble one. Besides, her nose was too large.