The Plague Court Murders hm-1 Page 3

  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 a-dazzle with split reflections of lights.

  Presently we pulled up outside one of those new whitestone, 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 somewhere, 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.

  III THE FOUR ACOLYTES

  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 migh
t 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 scrollwork. 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.

  Again she spoke softly, without emotion.

  "Why have you come here, Dean? And who are these men with you?"

  The voice was thin. It seemed to explore and probe, despite its professional sweetness, and I almost shuddered. Her black eyes never left his face, and she retained that mechanical smile. There was a sickliness about her.

  Halliday straightened up. He made an effort.

  "I don't know whether you are aware of it," he said, "but this is my house." (She had put him on the defensive, as, I imagined, she always had. At his remark she only smiled, dreamily). "I hardly think, Aunt Anne, that I need your permission to come here. These gentlemen are my friends."

  "Present us."

  He did so, first to Lady Benning and then to Miss Latimer. It was a mad business, those formal introductions in the damp-smelling vault of a room, among the candle-flames and the spiders. Both of them-the cold, lovely girl standing against the mantelpiece, the reptilian pseudo-marquise nodding against her red silk cloak-were hostile. We were intruders in more senses than one. About them both was a kind of exaltation, which some might call self-hypnosis; a repressed and waiting eagerness, as at some tremendous spiritual experience they had once undergone and hoped to undergo again. I stole a sideways glance at Masters, but his face was as bland as ever. Lady Benning opened her eyes.

  "Dear, dear," she murmured to me, "of course you are Agatha Blake's brother. Dear Agatha. And her canaries." Her voice changed. "The other gentleman I fear I have not the pleasure of recognizing.... Now, dear boy, perhaps you will tell me why you are here?"

  "Why?" repeated Halliday. His voice cracked. He struggled with a baffled anger, and put out his hand towards Marion Latimer. "Why? Look at you - look at both of you! I can't stand this fog. I'm a normal, sane human being, and you ask me what I want here and why I'm trying to stop this nonsense! I'll tell you why we came. We came to investigate your blasted haunted house. We came here to get hold of your blasted turnip-ghost and smash it in little bits for good and all; and, by God!"

  The voice echoed and rang blatantly, and we all knew it. Marion Latimer's' face was white. Everything was very quiet again.

  "Don't challenge them, Dean," she said. "Oh, my dear, don't challenge them."

  But the little old lady only twitched up her fingers again, from palms flat on the chair-arm, and half shut her eyes, and nodded.

  "Do you mean that something impelled you to come here, dear boy?"

  . "I mean that I came here because I damned well chose."

  "And you want to exorcise this thing, dear boy?"

  "If you want to call it that," he said grimly; "yes. Look here, don't tell me - don't tell me that's why you're all here?"

  "We love you, dear boy."

  There was a silence, while the fire sputtered in small blue flames, and the rain ran soft-footed through the house; splashing and echoing in its mysterious places. Lady Benning went on in a voice of ineffable sweetness:

  "You need not be afraid here, dear boy. They cannot come into this room. But elsewhere, what then? They can take possession. They took possession of your brother James. That was why he shot himself."

  Halliday spoke in nothing more than a low, calm, serious voice. He said: "Aunt Anne, are you trying to drive me mad?"

  "We are trying to save you, dear boy."

  "Thanks," said Halliday. "That's jolly good of you."

  His hoarse tones had struck the wrong note again. He looked round at stony faces.

  "I loved James," said Lady Benning, and her face was suddenly pitted with wrinkles. "He was strong, but he could not stand them. So they will come for you, because you are James's brother and you are alive. James told me so, and he cannot ... you see, it is to give him peace. Not you. James. And until this thing is exorcised, not you, nor James will sleep.

  "You came here tonight. Perhaps it is best. There is safety in the circle. But this is the anniversary, and there is danger. Mr. Darworth is resting now. At midnight he will go alone to the little stone house in the yard, and before daylight he will have cleansed it. Not even the boy Joseph will go with him. Joseph has great powers, but they are receptive. He has not the knowledge to exorcise. We shall wait here. Perhaps we shall form a circle, although that may onl
y hinder him. That is all, I think."

  Halliday glanced at his fiancee.

  "You two," he said harshly, "came here alone with Darworth?"

  She smiled faintly. His presence seemed to comfort her, though she was a little afraid of him. She came close, and took his arm.

  "Dear old boy," she said - and it was the first human tone of voice we had heard in that literally damned house-"you are rather a tonic, you know. When I, hear you talking like that, in just that particular way, it seems to change everything. If we're not afraid, there's nothing to fear...."

  "But this medium - "

  She shook his arm. "Dean, a thousand times, I've told you Mr. Darworth is not a medium! He is a psychic, yes. But he concerns himself with causes rather than effects." She turned to Masters and me. Marion Latimer looked tired, but she was making an effort to be light and easy in an almost teasing fashion. "I suppose you know something about it, if Dean doesn't. Tell him the difference between a medium and a psychical researcher. Like Joseph and Mr. Darworth."

  Masters shifted heavily from one foot to the other. He was impassive, he did not even look pleased, standing there turning his bowler round in his hands; but I, who knew him well, could detect a curious ring in the slow, patient, reflective tones.

  "Why, yes, miss," he said. "I think I can tell you from my certain knowledge that I have never known Mr. Darworth to lend himself to demonstrations. Of himself, that is."

  "You know Mr. Darworth?" she asked quickly.

  "Ah! No, miss. Not exactly, that is. But I don't want to interrupt; you were saying-eh?"

  She looked at Masters again, rather puzzled. I was uneasy; the words "police officer" were to me as patent as though he had worn a placard, and I wondered if she had spotted him. Her cool, quick eyes searched his face; but she dismissed whatever notion she had.

  "But I was telling you, Dean. We're certainly not alone here with Mr. Darworth and Joseph. Not that we should have minded...." (Now what was this? Halliday had muttered something and jerked his head; while she was trying to look him out of countenance with a thin, bright imperiousness). "Not that we should have minded," she repeated, straightening her shoulders, "but, as a matter of fact, Ted and the major are here too."