“He’s not a bad young feller. The woman had simply got him where she wanted him, that’s all. … He didn’t know she was going to murder Ted Latimer, and dress Ted in those glaring loud clothes and shove him into the furnace—”
“What?” shouted Halliday.
“Humph. Didn’t I tell you that?” H.M. inquired blandly. “Yes. Y’see, Joseph had to disappear. Glenda Darworth didn’t mean for there to be any more murders; she was simply goin’ to fade out, let the police think what they might, and reappear as Glenda Darworth to claim her two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. But Ted Latimer spotted Joseph when Ted slipped out that night. And so, y’see, Ted had to die.”
CHAPTER XXI
Halliday got up and walked aimlessly about the room. With his back to us, he stared into the fire.
“This,” he said, “this will just about kill Marion. …”
“Sorry, son,” said H.M. gruffly. “I—well, y’see, I couldn’t tell you two this afternoon. It might have spoiled my game for tonight. And I sort of thought, ‘Well,’ I thought, ‘they’re pretty happy, those two. They’ve been through hell and blight for some time; they’ve had a crack-brained hag of an aunt riding ’em as badly as Darworth ever did, and even accusing one of ’em of murder when she saw they were happy; and there’s no use darkening one day now.’ ”
He spread his fingers and inspected them sulkily.
“Yes, the kid’s dead. He was a good deal the height and build of ‘Joseph,’ you remember? That’s what made it possible. It was very nearly spoiled when that workman Watkins looked through the cellar window and spotted the murderer at work. But, d’ye see, it was the fact that convinced us Joseph was really dead. He saw only the back of the person on the floor; he saw those clothes; didn’t I tell you to remember them—which he’d seen Joseph wearing every day. And the window-pane was dusty, and only one candle was burnin’; who wouldn’t assume it was Joseph?… Oh, the woman was clever enough. Pouring kerosene on that body, pushing it in the furnace, wouldn’t have been necessary; it was unnecessary brutality; if she hadn’t only wanted to make identification impossible. They’d get a charred mass out, with a few shreds of Joseph’s clothes and a pair of his shoes, and there you are. It was an opportunity, and she took advantage of it. Why do you think she chloroformed him? Why, to get him bundled into Joseph’s clothes before she stabbed him with the dagger. That’s why they were so long together in the house before he was chucked in the furnace.”
Halliday whirled round.
“And this fellow McDonnell?”
“Steady, son. Go easy, now. … I saw him tonight; I saw him just before I went to Plague Court. Y’see I knew his father. I knew old Grosbeak very well.”
“So—what?”
“He swore to me he didn’t know there was goin’ to be a murder; he didn’t know Darworth was to be killed at all. Maybe I’d better tell you about it.
“I come up to him and said, ‘Son, are you off duty now?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ So I asked him where he lived, and he said a flat in Bloomsbury, and I suggested that he invite me over for a drink. I could tell then he knew something was wrong. When we got there he put the latch on the door, and turned on the light; then he just turned round and said flatout, ‘Well?’ So I said, ‘McDonnell, I thought a lot of your father, and that’s why I’m here. She’s only been playing you on the string, and you know it now, don’t you?’ I said, ‘She’s the ace of she-blood-suckers, and she’s got certain characteristics of the devil; and, since she burnt poor Latimer out at Magnolia Cottage, you know that now too, don’t you?’ ”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing. He just stood there and looked at me, but he turned a funny color. Then he put his hands over his eyes for a second; and sat down, and finally he said, ‘Yes, I know it—now.’
“Then we didn’t say anything, but I smoked my pipe and watched him, and afterwards I said, ‘Why not tell me about it?’ ” H.M. rubbed his big hand wearily across his forehead. “He asked me why he should, so I said: ‘After your friend Glenda killed young Latimer yesterday afternoon she put on her regular woman’s clothes and took the night Dover-Calais service over the Channel and got into Paris late last night. She’d cleaned everything out of the house that could incriminate her,’ I said. ‘She turned up in Paris this morning as Darworth’s wife. At my request, Darworth’s solicitor cabled her to come to England for the adjustment of financial affairs. She’s answered that she will be at Victoria at nine-thirty tonight. It’s now a quarter to eight, and there’s no way of reaching her. When she gets in, Inspector Masters will meet her at the station and ask her to come to Scotland Yard. At eleven o’clock she’ll be escorted to Plague Court to witness a little exhibition of mine.’ I said. ‘She’s done for, son. She’ll be arrested tonight.’
“Well, he sat there a long time with his hands over his eyes. He said, ‘Do you think you can convict her?’ And I said, ‘You know damned well I can.’ Then he nodded his head a couple of times, and said, ‘Well, that finishes both of us. Now I’ll tell you the story.’ And he did.”
Halliday strode up to the desk. “What did you do? Where is he?”
“Better hear what he had to say first,” suggested H.M. mildly. “Sit down. I’ll sketch it out, if you like. …
“Most of it you know. How it was the woman’s idea that she and Darworth should set up in this line of mulcting the gullible—although she always swore to McDonnell Darworth forced her into it—and, with long intervals between, they’ve been hooking various people for about four years. Darworth was to pose as the romantic bachelor, as a bait for the women; she was the dull medium who should arouse no suspicion in Darworth’s lady friends. And it all went well until two things happened, (1) Darworth fell for Marion Latimer, and (2) last July McDonnell was sent to get a line on Darworth’s activities by the police, and discovered who ‘Joseph’ was.
“It happened by accident; he stumbled on the ‘mysterious lady’ leaving Magnolia Cottage in her proper costume, and trailed her. What happened subsequently isn’t very clear from what he told me, but I gather she used every one of her own tricks to shut his mouth. It seems McDonnell went on a holiday not long afterwards; and spent it with Mrs. Darworth at her villa in Nice. … Oh, yes. When the persuasive Glenda put herself out to be fascinating, by God, she was fascinating! Incidentally, while McDonnell was telling me this, he kept saying, ‘How could you know how beautiful she is? You never saw her except in that make-up!’ over and over again. Son, it was a bit o’ real ghastliness to hear him pleading that, as though it were an excuse. He even rushed to a drawer and got out a lot of photographs, all the time he was tellin’ about murder; and I was readin’ between the lines. …
“Do you know what I was readin’ between the lines, and why good old Glenda took such pains to win him over so he’d do anything she liked? By that time she was beginning to realize Darworth’s little game. Darworth purported to be bleeding the Benning circle, and handling the Plague Court matter for their mutual benefit; but Glenda knew all about the Latimer girl, so she determined to—”
“Beat him to the punch, eh?” said Halliday bitterly. “Nice little girl. Ha. Just in case he tries to shove arsenic in her coffee, she’ll return the compliment and collect two hundred thousand. … Good. Marion should hear all this. It’d please her to think—”
“No offense, old son,” said H.M. “But that’s about it. Oh, y’see, she pretended to believe Darworth when he told her all this; meantime, she was pourin’ out a tale of suffering into McDonnell’s ears. Darworth’s dominating will had forced her to do all this: why? Because she was afraid of him, because he had murdered his first wife and she was afraid he might murder her—”
“And McDonnell believed all that?” snapped Halliday. “Rot!”
“Are you sure,” said H.M. quietly, “you haven’t believed even rawer things in the last six months?… Steady. Let me go on. Well, meantime, there was a real danger that Darworth might take it into his head to do just that: dispose of
his second wife as he disposed of the first, by smothering her with a pillow and burying the remains. Glenda never could tell. Those two were playing a gentle, polite, murderous game against each other; and, if Marion Latimer had given Darworth more encouragement, he might have had a shot at it. That worried Glenda. She didn’t want any hanky-panky until she could get her knife into him. Darworth never anticipated any physical attack from her; he thought the most she’d do was threaten to expose him.
“So, when Darworth got his idea of a ghost-attack at Plague Court, Glenda must have danced the saraband. ‘Mine enemy is delivered,’ said Glenda, ‘into—’ and the rest of it. Meantime, she twines herself round Darworth and says, ‘You’d never want to hurt me, would you?’ And Darworth, who had rosy visions of seein’ her tucked away underground with a dose of cyanide in her stomach, pats her head and says, ‘Of course not.’ ‘Good,’ says Glenda, twistin’ his coat-button lovingly; ‘because if you did, sweetheart, it would be just too bad.’
“ ‘Come, come,’ says Darworth gently; ‘refrain from such language, my dear. Forget that you were brought up in a circus, and that the only Shakespearean parts you ever understood were Doll Tear- sheet and Petruchio’s wife. Why so?’ ‘Because,’ says she, turning up those eyes of hers—and they’re damn’ attractive eyes—’there may be somebody besides myself who knows you killed Elsie Fenwick. … And if anything ever happens to me—?’
“You get the idea?” demanded H.M. “She was goin’ to scare Darworth properly, in case he should try any funny business. Probably he didn’t believe her when she told him that, but he was worried. If somebody else did know it, down would come all his plans on La Latimer—excuse me, son—down would come everything; and if his confounded wife had been indiscreet, he might find himself had up on a murder charge over a dozen years old. …”
“I say!” growled Major Featherton, who had been pulling hard at his mustache. “Then at my house—at my house, blast it—she had this chap McDonnell slide that message into his papers? Eh?”
“You got it,” nodded H.M. “At a place, d’ye see, where Joseph wasn’t even present! Burn me, do you wonder he was scared green? Because it would seem that one of this very circle—one of these people his plans were directed at—knew all about him, and was sardonically chuckling! It must have hit him straight across the back of the neck: one of those devoted acolytes of his was as bland and dangerous a hypocrite as himself. His immediate reaction was, ‘I’ve got to put this Plague Court hoax through as quickly as I can.’ Because why? Because somebody seemed out to queer his pitch, and he wanted to make his final smash to impress the Latimer girl; but, good God, which one of ’em had put that note in? Then he had time to reflect that there was a stranger, and it was probably the stranger … yet, when he questioned Ted Latimer about McDonnell, he got only the reply that it was a harmless old school friend. He suspected, but what could he do? I needn’t tell you that McDonnell’s apparently accidental falling in with Ted, his wangling of an invitation to Featherton’s, was no more an accident than Darworth’s death. …
“And he walked straight into the trap he’d created for himself, Darworth did. You know what happened. McDonnell swears he didn’t know Glenda intended to kill him. He says she told him Darworth had promised her that, if she aided him in this last piece of fraud, he would let her go. And so, night before last, there’s the delirious McDonnell waitin’ in the yard—not needed, not in the plot, but just in case! And you know how he was needed: ayagh, didn’t it give him a shock when he saw Masters there? You’ll admit he thought fast; he had to account for his presence there—which wasn’t natural—so he gave rather a distorted version of the truth. You remember how he was the one, as I told you, who insisted ‘Joseph’ was only a pawn for Darworth?”
“But why say Joseph was a drug-addict?” demanded Halliday.
“Those, my lad, were his instructions from Glenda,” said H.M. dryly, “in case anybody questioned him. He didn’t understand ’em then—but he understood ’em later on. …
“His account of the thing to me tonight—I wish I could reproduce it. He tells how he was nearly at his wits’ end to get Masters out of the room. He wanted to urge Glenda, now that the police were there, to abandon the crazy design of the fraudulent attack. She wouldn’t. In fact—d’you remember, from what Masters said?—she nearly blew the gaff herself. While Masters was there, she had the nerve to go over and make sure the boards were loose on the window of the room where she and McDonnell had been put. …”
“The boards on the window?” interrupted Halliday.
“Sure. Have you forgotten that the wall round Plague Court runs within three feet of the windows in the house? And that they’re high windows, from which a good jumper could get to the top of the wall with one swing? That was how she walked round to the back of the house without leaving a footprint; she went on top of the wall. And you know what she did. She left McDonnell there while Masters was prowlin’ upstairs—the whole shooting would take only three or four minutes. She and Darworth had prepared the whole scene the night before; you, Halliday, blundered in on them in your travels, and I don’t know how they played ghost on you, but it seems they succeeded. …
“Meantime, somebody meshed more gears, and caused trouble for us. Ted Latimer got up and sneaked out of the other room. What happened is probably this. Instead of goin’ straight through the house—he could see your light, Ken, in the kitchen where you were lookin’ over that manuscript—he thought he’d escape observation if he went outside and round the house. Well, he’d no Sooner got out on the steps than it entered that queer brain of his that he might be funking his duty if he didn’t walk straight through the evil influences of the house, and defy them. Yah! So he turns round and goes back through the hall; and he leaves the front door unlatched.
“Now, the probable fact is that Ken didn’t hear him when he passed the door of the kitchen going towards the outside. And, no sooner had he got to the door at the rear of the house—the one givin’ on the yard—then he saw … well, what?
“We’ll never know precisely that; the boy’s dead, and Glenda never told McDonnell. It’s most probable that he saw ‘Joseph,’ in the light of the fire in the window, climbing down the roof on the window with the gun and silencer in his hand. A silencer, you know, isn’t altogether silent; it makes a noise as though you cupped the palms of your hands and brought them together quickly. Now Ted was in a state to see evil spirits; he may even have tried to convince himself that that’s what he did see; but it wouldn’t quite wash. …
“He’d keep quiet, and determine his line. But Glenda saw him in the doorway, and he was marked from that minute. She wasn’t sure he’d seen her, but it must have been a horrible moment.
“In the interval, what has happened? Masters is coming down from upstairs. When he first went up, the wind had moved the front door, and he had closed it on the latch. Well, down he comes again … and sees the front door open as Ted had left it. Son, if he’d gone in the room where ‘Joseph’ and McDonnell were supposed to have been sitting—well, it would’ve been all up. But he sees that open door and he charges out like a maniac; to find, of course, no footprints going round the side of the house. He comes round the side of the house as ‘Joseph,’ the work finished, is returning on the other side. He hears Darworth’s moans … y’know, I don’t really believe Darworth knew his confederate had finished him, even then, or he’d have sung out boldly.
“But young Latimer, standin’ in the doorway just outside the house, heard Masters come tearin’ round the side of the house; he’d heard those moans of Darworth’s also. He still ain’t sure what they mean—he still ain’t sure of anything. But he hears Masters come chargin’ round the side of the house, and he realizes that, if there’s really been any dirty work, his position might be embarrassin’. He ducked back to the front room, and arrived not a second before Darworth pulled the bell-cord.
“Meantime, Glenda was back. She’d shoved the gun and silencer under
a floorboard that she and Darworth had prepared in that room the night before. And McDonnell’s description to me of that woman when she came in and faced him—he was laying out cards in that alleged Rummy game—is fairly revealing. He said she was flushed, and her eyes were shining. She rolled up the sleeve of her coat and (to his own stupefaction) very calmly went about her morphine alibi. ‘My dear,’ she said to him, ‘I believe I’ve made a mistake. I believe I’ve really killed the—after all.’ And she smiled.
“Do you wonder he was nearly insane when he rushed out? Masters tells me he never saw a man look like McDonnell when he saw him first after that, holdin’ a handful of cards like a crazy man.
“I think you know the rest. The doubtful point was: what would Ted say? You know what he did; he kept quiet, and yelled at you that it really was a ghost-murder after all. It had taken possession of him that a fake ghost-murder was better publicity than a common shooting; and he was still puzzled about it anyway, because you all swore Darworth was murdered with a dagger. … By the way, wasn’t that his first question to you? ‘With Louis Playge’s dagger? With what?’ And then he kept quiet until he announced his belief in a supernatural killing.
“The rest of it will always be pure speculation, because the only two people who could tell us how Ted Latimer was lured out to Brixton are both dead. … Obviously Glenda had to work very, very rapidly. Ted might change his rather volatile mind at any minute, and decide to talk. One suggestion as to what ‘Joseph’ had been up to, and Glenda might be done for. If necessary, she was prepared to follow that boy home and close his mouth. So she got Masters to send her home—‘Joseph’ was very sleepy, much more sleepy than the amount of morphine she’d taken would warrant. But she didn’t go home. …
“And then she got the brilliant idea of her life. You know what it was. ‘Joseph’ had planned to disappear; but what if ‘Joseph’ were supposed to have been murdered?… The essential thing was for her to get to Ted immediately, and spin some story that would keep his mouth closed until she lured him out to Magnolia Cottage.
The Plague Court Murders Page 25
