The Plague Court Murders

by John Dickson Carr

  “They’re out now, I tell you!” cried Ted. “They won’t like it. They’re gathering, and they’re dangerous.”

  Major Featherton said that as a gentleman and a sportsman he considered it his duty to go along and give us safe conduct. Stopping short, Halliday gave him a kind of satirical salute, and laughed. But Ted Latimer touched his arm, grimly, and the major allowed himself to be led towards the front of the hall. They were all moving now, the major with a rolling stateliness, Ted hurriedly, Joseph in obedient and unperturbed slowness. Our lights followed the footsteps of that little procession, and the high darkness pushed round us like water, and I turned towards that little whitewashed passage that led out to where the rain was splashing. …

  “Look out, man!” said Masters, and dived to yank Halliday aside.

  Something fell out of the darkness. I heard a crash; somebody’s flashlight jumped and vanished; and, while the vibrations beat and whirled round my ears, I saw Ted Latimer turn round with staring eyeballs, his candle held high.

  CHAPTER IV

  Full in the beam of my electric torch, Halliday sat on the floor, supporting himself with his hands behind him, and looking dazed. Another beam—Masters’— after flickering on him momentarily, had gone straight up into the vault like a searchlight; it was playing over the staircase, the stair-rail, the landing immediately above. They were empty.

  Then Masters faced round on the group of three. “Nobody is hurt,” he said heavily. “You’d better go into the front room, all of you. And hurry. If they are alarmed, tell them—in there—we will join them in five minutes.”

  They did not argue, but turned into the room and the door scraped shut.

  Then Masters began to chuckle.

  “That’s torn it sir. They’re cool, they are. Why, sir,” said the inspector, with a sort of broad tolerance, “that’s one of the oldest, stalest, childishest tricks in the whole bag. Talk about whiskers. … Lummy! You can rest easy now, Mr. Halliday. I’ve got him. I always thought he was a fake. And I’ve got him now.”

  “Look here,” said Halliday, pushing back his hat, “what the devil happened anyway?” His voice was under control, but a muscle jerked in his shoulder, and his eyes wandered round the floor. “I was standing there. And then something hit the flashlight out of my hand; I was holding it loose. I think”—he experimented, without rising—“I think my wrist is numb. Something hit the floor, something came flying down; bang! Ha. Ha ha. Funny, maybe, but damned if I see it. I need a drink. Ho ho.”

  Masters, still chuckling, turned the beam on the floor. Lying a few feet in front of Halliday were the smashed fragments of a vessel so heavy that the shards had scattered very little, and a third of it was still intact. It was a grayish stonework, now black with age: a sort of trough some three feet long and ten inches high, which must once have held flowers. Masters’ chuckle died, and he stared.

  “That thing–” he said, “my God, that thing would’ve crushed your head like an orange. … You don’t know how lucky you are, sir. It wasn’t meant to hit you, of course. They didn’t mean it; not them! That wasn’t on the cards. But a foot or two to the left. …”

  “They?” repeated Halliday, starting to get up. “You don’t mean—?”

  “I mean Darworth and young Joseph, that’s who. They only meant to show that the powers, the evil powers, were getting out of control; that they were fighting us, and firing that stone thing at you because you insisted on coming here. It was for somebody, anyhow. … That’s right. Look up. Higher. Yes, it came from the top of the staircase; from the landing. …”

  Halliday’s knee-muscles were not as steady as he had thought. He knelt there, absurdly, until his own rage helped him to his feet.

  “Darworth? Man, are you telling me—that—that swine,” he pointed, “stood up there—on the landing, and dropped—?”

  “Steady, Mr. Halliday. Don’t raise your voice, if you please—not at all. I don’t doubt Mr. Darworth is out there where they left him. Just so. There’s nobody on the landing. It was that kid Joseph.”

  “Masters, I’ll swear it wasn’t,” I said. “I happened to have my light on him the whole time. Besides, he couldn’t have—”

  The inspector nodded. He seemed possessed of an endless patience. “Ah? You see? That’s part of the trick. I’m not exactly what you’d call an educated man, gentlemen,” he explained, with a rather judicial air and broad gesture, “but this trick, now … well, it’s old. Giles Sharp, Woodstock Palace, sixteen forty-nine. Anne Robinson, Vauxhall, seventeen seventy-two. It’s all in my files. A gentleman at the British Museum has been very helpful. I’ll tell you how they worked it in just a minute. Excuse me.”

  From his hip-pocket, solicitous as a steward, he whipped out a cheap gunmetal flask, which had been carefully polished. “Try some of this, Mr. Halliday. I’m not a drinking man myself, but I always take it along when I tackle matters of this kind. I find it useful—eh? For others, I mean. There was a friend of my wife, who used to go and visit a medium at Kensington—”

  Halliday leaned against the stairs and grinned. He was still pale; but, somehow, a great weight seemed lifted from him.

  “Go on, you swine,” he said abruptly, peering up at the landing. “Go on, damn you. Chuck another.” He shook his fist. “Now that I know the thing’s a trick, I don’t care what you do. That’s what I was afraid of: that it wasn’t. Thanks, Masters. I’m not quite so bad as your wife’s friend, but that thing was a jolly close call. I will have one. … The question is, what do we do now?”

  Masters motioned us to follow, and we went over the creaking boards and out into the moldy gloom of the passage beyond. Halliday’s flashlight was smashed, and I offered him mine; but he refused it.

  “Look sharp for more traps,” the inspector growled in a whisper. “They may have the whole house flummoxed. … The point’s just this. Darworth and Company are up to some game. They mean to put on a show of some sort, and for some more than ordinary reason. I want to find out why, but I don’t want to crash in on Darworth,” he nodded, “out there. If I could make sure he doesn’t leave his post, and at the same time keep an eye on that kid. … Hum. Hay-em—”

  All this time his light had been taking in details. The passage was narrow, but of great length, and reinforced by heavy beams; on either side were half-a-dozen doors, set beside barred windows apparently giving on interior rooms. I tried to conceive their purpose, in the middle seventeenth century when this house had been built, and then I remembered. Merchant’s warehouse rooms, of course.

  Peering through one set of bars (it might have been a counting-house), I saw a tank-like desolation strewn with forgotten firewood. I had hazy remembrances of speckled porcelain, Mecca muslin, canes and snuff-bottles, which was curious, because I could not remember having read of these things. The images came suddenly, mixed with the stifling uneasy air. There were no forms or faces—if you can except the suggestion of somebody pacing up and down, up and down, endlessly, on the brick floor—but only the things of finery. I cursed myself for growing light-headed in the bad air; yet the blight of this house grew and grew in my brain. Staring at the dropsical walls, I wondered why they called it Plague Court.

  “Hullo!” said Masters, and I pulled up short behind Halliday.

  He had reached a door at the end of the passage, and had been peering outside. The rain fell very lightly now. On our right, a smaller passage wandered off into a black rabbit-warren, of kitchens which looked like burnt-out furnaces. The other door led into the yard. Turning his light upwards, Masters pointed.

  It was a bell. A rusty bell set into an iron framework, about the size of a top-hat, and it hung in the low roof just over the door to the yard. Since it seemed only a means of communication from the old days of the house, I saw nothing odd about it until Masters shifted his lamp a little, and pointed again. Down the side of the bell ran a length of fine wire, new wire, gleaming faintly.

  “More tricks?” said Halliday, after a pause. “
Yes. It’s wire right enough. It goes … here, down the side, out through the boards of this window, into the yard. Is this another stunt?”

  “Don’t touch it!” said Masters, as the other stretched up his hand. He peered out into the dark. The cool wind brought a smell of mud, and other odors less pleasant. “Don’t want to call the attention of our friend out there, but I shall have to risk a flash. … Yes. The wire comes out, down, and runs across the ground towards the little stone house. Hurrum. Well …”

  With him we stared out. The rain had died to a mutter of splashings, to stirrings along the gutters and a sullen drip-drip close beside us, but it still made prankish noises in the yard. I could see very little, for the sky was overcast, and shapes of buildings blocked it out round the wall which enclosed the big piece of ground at the rear. The little stone house was about forty yards away from us. Its only light was a flickering gleam that showed, slyly, at the gratings of little embrasures—they were too small to be called windows—set close under the roof. It stood lonely, with a crooked tree growing near it.

  The light flickered again, curled eerily, with a sort of invitation, and shrank back. That faint spatter and stir of the rain made the muddy yard sound as though it were infested with rats.

  Halliday made a movement like one who is cold.

  “Excuse my ignorance,” he said. “This may seem excellent fun, but it isn’t sense. Cats with their throats cut. Bells with wire attached to them. Thirty-odd pounds of stone flower-box chucked at you by somebody who isn’t there. I’m like the chap at the Circumlocution Office; I want to know. Besides, there was something in that passage—I could have sworn. …”

  I said: “The wire on the bell probably doesn’t mean anything. It’s too obvious. Darworth may have arranged it with the rest of them as a sort of alarm-bell, in case—”

  “Ah! Just so. In case of what?” Masters muttered. He glanced sharply to the right, as though he had heard something. “Ah, ah, but I wish I’d known this! I wish I’d been prepared. They both need watching, and (excuse me) neither of you gentlemen knows enough of the dodges— Just between ourselves, and confidentially, I’d give a month’s pay to lay Darworth by the heels.”

  “You’re dead-set anti-Darworth, aren’t you?” asked Halliday, looking at him curiously. Masters’ tone had not been pleasant. “Why? You can’t do anything to him, you know. I mean to say, you told me yourself he’s no Gerrard-Street fortune-teller making the tambourines rattle a guinea at a time. If a man wants to investigate psychical research, or try a séance for his friends in his own home, that’s his business. Beyond exposing him—”

  “H’m. That,” agreed Masters, “is Mr. Darworth’s own copper-bottomed cleverness. You heard what Miss Latimer said. He don’t get embroiled. He’s only a psychical researcher. He’s careful to be only the patron of a tame medium. Then, if anything happens …why, he was deceived by a fraud, and his honesty isn’t questioned any more than the dupes he introduced his medium to. And got money from. He could do it all over again. Now, as man to man, Mr. Halliday, come!—Lady Benning is a wealthy woman, isn’t she?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Miss Latimer?”

  “I believe so. If that’s what he wants—” Halliday snapped, and then checked himself. He went on, obviously changing what he intended to say, “If that’s what he wants, I’d write him a check for five thousand any time he agreed to clear out.”

  “He wouldn’t do business. Not him. But you can see this is a heaven-sent chance. If he tries anything himself, tonight—and you see, not knowing I’m here—why—huh!” Masters grunted expressively. “What’s more, the kid don’t know me. I never saw friend Joseph before. Excuse me, gentlemen. I won’t be a minute; but I want to—um—reconnoiter. Stop there, and don’t move till I get back.”

  Before we could speak he had gone down the two or three steps into the yard and disappeared. Though he was a bulky man, he made no noise. He made no noise, that is, until (about ten seconds later) his footstep squelched in the mud; as though he had stopped dead.

  Far over in the right-hand corner of the yard, the beam of a flashlight had appeared. We watched it, silent in the soft-rustling rain: sharp in contrast to the ugly, suggestive reddish glow dancing in the windows of the stone house. It was directed on the ground. It held steady; then it winked off and on three times rapidly, a pause, a longer flash, and disappeared.

  I nudged Halliday as he started to speak. After a brief interval, mysterious with rustlings and splashings, there was a reply. From the spot where I judged Masters to be, Masters’ flashlight did the same.

  Then somebody was moving over there in the dark, and Masters’ bulk appeared before us on the steps again, breathing heavily.

  “Signal?” I asked.

  “It’s one of our people. Yes I answered him. That’s the code; there couldn’t be a mistake. Now what,” Masters said in a flat voice, “one of our people. …”

  “Evening, sir,” somebody whispered, from the foot of the steps. “I thought it was your voice.”

  Masters got him up and into the passage. He was, as the light showed, a thin, wiry, nervous young man, with an intelligent face which caught you with its student-like earnestness. His soaked hat hung down grotesquely, and he wiped his face with a soaked handkerchief.

  “Hul-lo,” grunted Masters, “so it’s you, Bert? Ha. Gentlemen, this is Detective-Sergeant McDonnell.” He became indulgent. “He does the same sort of work I used to. But Bert here’s a university man; one of our new kind, and ambitious. You may have seen his name in the paper–he’s looking for that lost dagger.” He added sharply: “Well, Bert? What is it? You can speak out.”

  “Hunch of mine, sir,” the other answered respectfully. Continuing to wipe his face, he regarded the inspector through narrowed eyes. “I’ll tell you about it in a minute. That rain’s filthy, and I’ve been out there for two hours. I—I suppose I don’t have to tell you, sir, that your—your bête noir, Darworth, is out there?”

  “Now, then,” Masters said curtly. “Now, then. If you want promotion, my lad, you stick to your superior officers. Eh?” After this somewhat mysterious pronouncement he wheezed a moment, and went on: “Stepley told me you’d been sent to get a line on Darworth months ago, and, when I heard you were looking into that dagger business—”

  “You put two and two together. Yes, sir.”

  Masters peered at him. “Exactly. Exactly. I can use you, my lad. I’ve got work for you. But first I want facts, and want ’em quick. You’ve seen the little stone house, eh? What’s the lay-out?”

  “One good-sized room. Roughly oblong shape; stone walls, brick floor. Inside of the roof makes the ceiling. There are four of those little grated windows in the middle of each side, high up. The door is under the window you can see from here. …”

  “Any way out except the door?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I mean, any way the man could get out—secretly?”

  “Not a chance, sir. That is, I don’t think. … Besides, he couldn’t get out the door, either. They padlocked it. He asked them to padlock it on the outside.”

  “Doesn’t mean anything. Yes; it means hanky-panky. I wish I could have got a look inside. What about the chimney?”

  “I looked into all that,” McDonnell answered. He tried to keep from giving a jerk with the cold. “There’s an iron grating in the chimney just over the fireplace. The gratings in the windows are solid in the stone, and you couldn’t get a lead-pencil through the openings. Also, I heard Darworth drop the bar inside the door. … Excuse me, sir. Your questions: I suppose your idea is the same as mine?”

  “About Darworth trying to get out?”

  “No, sir,” replied McDonnell quietly. “About something or somebody trying to get in.”

  Instinctively we all turned in the dark, to look at the ugly little house where the light was changing and writhing and inviting. The cross-barred grating of that little window—scarcely a foot square—was silhouetted in st
rong outline as the firelight loomed on it inside. And, just for a moment, a head was silhouetted there too. It seemed to be peering out from behind the grating.

  There was no reason for the shock of horror that struck me, and made my muscles watery. There was no reason why Darworth, if he were a tall man,should not stand on a chair and look out of the window. But the silhouetted head moved slowly, as though it had trouble with its neck. …

  I doubt that any of the others saw it, for the fire-glow had died away, and Masters was speaking harshly. I did not hear all of it, but he was giving McDonnel a dressing-down as a weak-kneed something’d something who had got himself impressed by the damned tomfoolery of—

  “Excuse me, sir.” McDonnell was still respectful, but I think the tone of his voice had some effect. “Would you like to hear my story? About why I’m here?”

  “Come along,” said Masters curtly. “Away from here. I’ll take your word for it that he’s padlocked in. That is, I’ll go and see for myself in a minute. Um, don’t misunderstand, now, lad—!”

  He took us a little way down the passage, threw his light into a door at random, and motioned us in. It was part of an ancient kitchen. McDonnell had taken off his shapeless hat and was lighting a cigarette. His sharp greenish eyes glanced at Halliday and me over the matchflame.

  “They’re all right,” said Masters; he did not mention our names.

  “It happened,” McDonnell went on, rather jerkily, “just a week ago tonight, and it was the first real progress I’d made. You see, I was sent to get a line on Darworth last July; but I didn’t get anything. He might be an impostor, but—”

  “We know all that.”

  “Yes, sir.” McDonnell stopped a moment. “But the business fascinated me. Especially Darworth. I think you know how it is, Inspector. I spent a good deal of time collecting Darworth information, looking over the house, and even asking for leads from people–people I used to know. But they couldn’t help me. Darworth would open his mouth about psychical research only to a small, closed circle. They were all filthily rich people, by the way. And several friends of mine, who knew him and said he was a poisonous blighter, didn’t even know he was interested in spiritualism. Well, you can see how it was. …