The Plague Court Murders

by John Dickson Carr

  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 chimneypot 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 the 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 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. …’ Some body’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.

  CHAPTER XIII

  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 Amercian 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.

  Somebody had obviously been indiscreet. Scotland Yard can muzzle the press tolerably well; and there had been an error somewhere, unless—it suddenly occurred to me—Masters wanted to accentuate the supernatural side of the business for reasons of his own. The stories were all reasonably accurate so far as they went, though there was no hint of suspicion towards any of our group.

  Curiously enough, these wild speculations about the supernatural tended to. diminish rather than accentuate in my own mind the very suggestions they made. In the clear-headed morning after, away from the echoes and dampness of Plague Court, one fact became apparent. Whatever others might believe, nobody who had been in the house at the time could doubt that we faced nothing more than either a very lucky or a very brilliant murderer, who could be hanged like anybody else. But that in itself might be problem enough.

  When I was still mulling it over after breakfast, the house-phone rang and they told me that Major Featherton was downstairs. Then I remembered his promise of last night.

  Major Featherton was annoyed. Despite the rain, he was tightened into morning-dress, with a silk hat and a rather startling tie; his shaven jowls were waxy with grooming, but his eyes looked puffy. The aroma of shaving-soap was strong. On my writing-table, as he planked down his hat, he caught sight of the tabloid with his bottle-of-beer picture; and he exploded. Evidently it was familiar. He said things about lawsuits; he drew comparisons between reporters and hyenas, stressing the more exalted moral character of the latter; and he was full of wild references to something that had just happened “at the Rag.” I gathered that there had been certain observations at the Army and Navy Club, together with some talk of presenting him with a tambourine for his next séance. It also appeared that a facetious brigadier had come up behind him and hissed, “Guinness is good for you.”

  I offered him a cup of coffee, which he refused, and a brandy and soda, which he accepted.

  “I was salutin’ the flag, dammit!” snorted Major Featherton, when he had been pushed into a chair with a consoling cigar lighted. “Now, confound it, I won’t be able to show my face anywhere; all because I toed to oblige Anne. A mess. Devil of a mess, that’s what it is. Now I don’t even know whether I ought to—go through with what I came to ask you about.

  Be in for a confounding ragging from. …” He paused, and sipped his drink. He brooded. “I phoned Anne this morning. She, was snappish last night; wouldn’t let me take her home. But she didn’t take my head off this morning, because the poor old girl’s upset, I gather Marion Latimer had phoned her before I did; called her an old troublemaker; and practically said straight out, both for herself and young Halliday, that the less they saw of her in the future the better they’d both like it. However—!”

  I waited. …

  “Look here, Blake,” he continued, after another pause. The old cough was racking him again, at intervals of minutes. “I said a lot of things last night that I shouldn’t have; eh?”

  “You mean about hearing noises in the room?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, if they were true. …”

  He scowled, and grew confidential. “Certainly they were true. But that ain’t the point, my lad. Surely you can see it? Point is this. We can’t have them thinking what they’re bound to think, sooner or later, and that’s plain downright tommyrot. That one of us —eh? H’mf. Tommyrot! And it ought to be stopped.”

  “What’s your own notion of a solution, Major?”

  “Confound it, I’m not a detective. But I’m a plain man, and I do know this. The idea that one of us—baah!” He leaned back, made a heavy gesture, and almost sneered. “I tell you it’s somebody who sneaked in unknown to us, or it’s that medium. Why, see here! Suppose one of us did want to do that blighter in: which we wouldn’t, mind you. Fancy anybody taking risks like that, with a whole room full of people all around! It’s all nonsense. Besides, how could anybody do a thing like that without getting all smeared up with blood? I’ve seen the locals trying to knife our sentries too often; and anybody who cut old Darworth up like that would’ve been soaked— couldn’t help it. Bah.”

  Some cigar-smoke got into his eye, and he rubbed it blearily. Then he leaned forward with great intentness, his hands on his knees.

  “So what I suggest, sir, is this. Put it in the proper hands. Then it’ll be all right. I know him well, and so do you. I know he’s devilish lazy; but we’ll put it up to him as a matter of—of caste, dammit! We’ll say, ‘Look here, old boy. …’ ”

  Then there occurred to me what should have occurred long before. I sat up. “You mean,” I said, “H.M.? The old Chief? Mycroft?”

  “I mean Henry Merrivale. Exactly. Eh?”

  H.M. on a Scotland Yard case. … I thought again of that room high over Whitehall, which I had not seen since 1922. I thought of the extremely lazy, extremely garrulous and slipshod figure who sat grinning with sleepy eyes; his hands folded over his big stomach and his feet propped up on the desk. His chief taste was for lurid reading-matter; his chief complaint that people would not treat him seriously. He was a qualified barrister and a qualified physician, and he spoke atrocious grammar. He was Sir Henry Merrivale, Baronet, and had been a fighting Socialist all his life. He was vastly conceited, and had an inexhaustible fund of bawdy stories. …

  Looking past Featherton, I remembered the old days. They began calling him Mycroft when he was head of the British Counter-Espionage Department. The notion of even the rawest junior calling him Sir Henry would have been fantastic. It was Johnny Ireton, in a letter from Constantinople, who started the nickname; but it failed to stick. “The most interesting figure in the stories about the hawk-faced gentleman from Baker Street,” Johnny wrote, “isn’t Sherlock at all; it’s his brother Mycroft. Do you remember him? He’s the one with as big or bigger a deductive-hat than S.H., but is too lazy to use it; he’s big and sluggish and won’t move out of his chair; he’s a big pot in some mysterious department of the government, with a card-index memory, and moves only in his orbit of lodgings-club-Whitehall. I think he only comes into two stories, but there’s a magnificent scene in which Sherlock and Mycroft stand in the window of the Diogenes Club rattling out an exchange of deductions about a man passing by in the street—both of them very casual, and poor Watson getting dizzier than he’s ever been before. … I tell you, if our H.M. had a little more dignity, and would always remember to put on a necktie, and would refrain from humming the words to questionable songs when he lumbers through rooms full of lady typists, he wouldn’t make a bad Mycroft. He’s got the brain, my lad; he’s got the brain. …”

  But H.M. discouraged the use of the nickname. In fact, he was roused to ire. He said he was not an imitation of anybody, and roared about it. Since I left the service in 1922, I had seen him only three times. Twice in the smoking-room of the Diogenes Club, when I was a guest; and on both occasions he was asleep. The last was at one of Mayfair crushes, where his wife had dragged him. He had slunk away from the dancing to see whether he could get a drink of whisky; I found him prowling near the butler’s pantry, and he said he was suffering. So we waylaid Colonel Lendinn and got up a poker-game at which the colonel and I lost eleven pounds sixteen shillings between
us. … There had been some talk of the old, days. I gathered that he was tinkering with the Military Intelligence Department. But he said—sourly, flicking the cards with a sharp crrr-ick under his big thumb—that the glamour was gone; that these were dull times for anybody with a brain; and that, because the thus-and-so’s were too parsimonious to install a lift, he still had to walk up five thus-and-so’d flights of stairs to his little office overlooking the gardens along Horse Guards Avenue.

  Featherton was talking again. I only half-heard him, for I was remembering the days when we were a very young crowd, and juggled with our lives twenty-four hours in a day under the impression that we were having a fine time, and thought it great sport to pull a tail-feather or two from the double-eagle that was Imperial Germany. The rain still slashed monoto nously, and Featherton’s voice rose:

  “—tell you what we’ll do, Blake. We’ll pick up a cab and go straight round there. If we phone to say we’re coming, he’ll swear he’s busy, eh? And go back to reading his confounded shockers. What say? Shall we go?”

  The temptation was too much.

  “Immediately,” I said.

  It was raining hard. Our cab skidded down into Pall Mall; and five minutes later we had swung left off the solid, barrack-windowed dignity of the Be-British Street, down a little, sylvan-looking thoroughfare which connects Whitehall with the Embankment. The War Office seemed depressed, like the dripping gardens that enclosed it behind. Away from the bustle at the front, there is a little side door close to the garden wall, which you are not supposed to know about.