He was a tall man, with a sort of shattered elegance about him. He lay partly on his right side, hunched and shrunken as though with pain. His cheek was against the floor, head twisted round towards the door in what might have been a last effort to look up. But he never could have looked up, even had he been alive. Evidently in the fall forward, his eyeglasses—with a little gold chain going round to his ear—had been smashed in his eyes. From this ruin the blood had run down over his face, past the teeth of the wide-open mouth now wrenched back in agony, and into his silky brown beard. The heavy brown hair had been worn long; it had tumbled out grotesquely over his ears, and was streaked with gray. He seemed almost be be imploring us, over the limp left- arm that was stretched out towards the side of the fireplace.
Except for the red-pulsing fire, there was no light in the room. It looked smaller here than from the outside: about twenty feet by fifteen, with stone walls crusted in green slime, a brick floor, and a groined ceiling of solid oak. Though there had been a recent attempt to clean it—a broom and mop were propped against one wall—this had done little against the corruption of years. And now the place was sticky and sickly with something you could smell through the damp fog of heat. …
Masters’ footfalls echoed on the brick floor as he walked towards the body. Insane words came back to me, and reverberated in my mind as they reverberated here when I spoke them aloud.
“ ‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him …?’ ”
Masters wheeled. It may have been in the way I repeated what the Scottish thane’s wife had said. He started to say something, but checked himself. The echoes still came back. “There’s the weapon,” said Masters, pointing. “See it?—lying over there the other side of him? It’s Louis Playge’s dagger, right enough. Table and chair, knocked over. Nobody hiding here. … You know a bit about medicine. Look at him, will you? But be careful of your boots. Muddy …”
It was, of course, impossible to avoid the blood. The floor, the walls, the hearthstone had been splashed before that twisted figure (hacked like a dummy at bayonet practice) had writhed forward with its hair in the fire. He seemed to have run from something—wildly, blindly, banging round in circles like a bat trying to get out of the room—while it set upon him. Through the hacking of his clothes I could see that his left arm, side, and thigh had been slashed. But the worst damage was to his back. Following the direction of his out-flung hand, I saw hanging beside the chimney-piece a part of a brick that had been tied as make-weight to the wire of the bell.
I stooped down over him. The fire stirred and fell a trifle. It made a changing play of expressions on the blind face, as though he were opening and shutting his mouth; and his dabbled cuff-link was fine gold. So far as I could ascertain, there were four stabs into the back. Most of them were high up and rather shallow, but the fourth was straight through the heart, driven down under the left shoulder-blade, and it had finished him. A small air-bubble, assuming blackish tints through the mess, had formed on the last wound.
“He’s not been dead five minutes,” I said. (This, we later learned, was a correct estimate.) “Though,” I was bound to add, “it might have been difficult for a police surgeon’s diagnosis later. He’s lying directly in front of a blaze that would keep the body at a much hotter temperature than blood-heat for some little time …”
The fire, in fact, was scorching, and I moved back on the slippery bricks. The man’s right arm was doubled up behind him; his fingers were gripping an iron blade about eight inches long, with a crudely fashioned hilt and a bone handle on which were visible the letters L.P.—faintly visible through the stains. It was as though he had plucked it out before he died. I stared round the room.
“Masters,” I said, “this thing is impossible—”
He swung round savagely. “Ah! Now we have it. I know what you’re going to say. Nothing could have come through windows or door, and got out again. I tell you it did happen, and by ordinary means, and, so help me, I’m going to find out—!” His big shoulders relaxed. The bland face looked suddenly dull and old. “There must be a way, sir,” he repeated doggedly. “Through the floor or ceiling or something. We’ll go over every inch of it. Maybe one of the window-gratings can be removed. Maybe—I don’t know. But there must be. … Keep out, if you please!” He broke off and waved towards the door. Halliday’s face had appeared in the aperture. His eyes slíd momentarily to the thing on the floor; he winced with a startled spasm, as though somebody had prodded a wound; then he looked straight at Masters, his face a muddy pallor, and spoke rapidly:
“There’s a copper out here, Inspector. You know, a—” he was having trouble with his words, “a policeman. We—we made a row with that log, and he heard it, and—” Suddenly he pointed. “Darworth there. He’s-?”
“Yes,” said Masters. “Keep out of here, sir, but don’t go up to the house yet. Tell Sergeant McDonnell to bring the constable in. He’ll have to make a station report. Steady, now!”
“I’m all right,” said Halliday, and put his hand over his mouth. “Funny. It—it looks like bayonet practice.”
That unholy image had occurred to me also. I peered round in the gloom again. The only touch of past splendor in this ruin, of a time when it had been lined with Sir Richard Seagrave’s Bayeux tapestries and cabinets of Japanese lacquer, remained in the solid oak ceiling. I saw Masters carefully putting down an inventory in his notebook, and as I followed his eyes I noted also the only other things in the room: (1) a plain deal table, overturned about six feet out from the fireplace, (2) a kitchen chair, also overturned, with Darworth’s overcoat across it, (3) a fountain-pen and some sheets of paper, lying in the blood behind Darworth’s body, (4) an extinguished candle in a brass holder, which had rolled to the middle of the floor, (5-6) the brick attached to the bell-wire, already indicated, and the mop and broom leaning on the wall beside the door.
And, as a final touch of horror, the spice burned in the fire was a sort of wistaria incense, which clogged the air in a sickly-sweet fog. … The whole case, the whole atmosphere, the whole tangle of contradictions, cried that there was something wrong in these facts.
“—Masters,” I said, as though in the middle of a conversation, “there’s another thing, too. Why didn’t he cry out, when he was attacked like that? Why didn’t he scream or make some noise, in addition to trying to get at that bell?”
Masters looked up from the notebook.
“He did,” said the inspector unsteadily. “That’s just it. He did. I heard him.”
CHAPTER VII
“You see,” Masters went on, clearing his throat, “that’s the worst part of it. It wasn’t a good healthy yell or scream, that’d ’uv brought me out fast and ready for trouble. It wasn’t very loud at all; but it got faster and faster—I could hear him talking—and then as though he were begging and imploring somebody, and then as though he’d begun to moan and cry. You wouldn’t have heard it at all, in where you were. I only heard it because I was outside, coming round the side of the house before then. …”
He stopped, stared round, and wiped his forehead with a gray cotton glove much too large for him.
“I admit it scared me. But I thought it was only a part of this man’s game, whatever it was. The voice got quicker and quicker, and more shrill. I could see some shadows chasing round on the window; it looked—it looked hellish, in that red light. And I wondered what to do. Did you ever have the sure and certain instinct that something’s really wrong, though you think it’s only a game?—and yet you hesitate, and stand there without doing anything, and afterwards it turns you sick to think what you should have done.” He opened and shut his hands: big and grizzled, a solid man in a mad world, peering round with dull blue eyes. “I shall be—lucky not to be demoted for this, sir. Well, I heard that; and all I did was stand there. Then I heard the bell.”
“How long afterwards?”
“Well, say a minute and a half after the noises had stopped. I’ve bun
gled,” he said bitterly, “I’ve bungled everything.”
“And how long did these noises last?”
“A little over two minutes, I should think.” He remembered something, and entered it in his note-book; the furrows were deepening in his big face. “But I only stood there at the back door to the passage. Like a mug! Like—never mind, sir. As though something was holding me, eh? Ha! You see, I was exploring. I’d gone out the front door of the house. …”
The shattered door creaked then. McDonnell slid through, accompanied by a policeman whose helmet and great black waterproof seemed to take up the whole room. He saluted Masters, seemed unsurprised, and said in one of those crisp Force voices of indeterminate accent: “Yes, sir? District station-house report, sir. Very necessary.” His waterproof made a big surge and swish as he whipped out a notebook, and under cover of it I got out at the door.
Even the yard smelled fresh after the foul air of the little room. The sky had cleared, and there were stars out. A short distance away, Halliday stood smoking a cigarette.
“So the swine’s done in,” he observed in a matter-of-fact tone. I was startled to see that there was neither nervousness nor affected ease about him. The glow of his cigarette caught crinkled, rather mocking eyes. “And with Louis Playge’s dagger, all according to schedule, eh? Blake, this is a great night for me. I mean it.”
“Because Darworth’s dead?”
“No-o. Because the whole game has been queered.” He hunched his shoulders under the raincoat. “Look here, Blake. I suppose you’ve read the dark history? Masters said you were hard at it. Let’s be rational. I never really believed in all that nonsense about ‘possession,’ or the prowling spook either. I’ll admit it upset me. But now the, whole air is cleared-Lord, and how it’s cleared! By three things.”
“Well?”
He meditated, drawing deeply on his cigarette. Behind us we could hear Masters and McDonnell arguing, and heavy footsteps clumping about.
“The first, old boy, is that this bogus ghost has definitely destroyed his ghostliness by killing Darworth. So long as it only prowled and rattled windows, it could alarm us. But here’s the funny thing: the moment it takes an extremely ordinary lethal weapon and punches holes in somebody, we get skeptical. Maybe if it had only come in and slashed at Darworth a couple of times, then killed him with fright, it would have been effective. A stabbing ghost may be good spiritualism, but it isn’t good sense. It’s absurd. It’s as though the ghost of Nelson had stalked up from the crypt of St. Paul’s, only to bean a tourist with its telescope. … Oh, I know. It’s horrible, if you like. It’s inhuman murder, and somebody ought to hang. But as for the ghostliness …”
“I see the point. And what’s the second thing?”
His head was cocked on one side, as though he were staring at the roof of the little house. He made a sound as though he had started a chuckle, and cut if off in the presence of death.
“Very simple. I know perfectly damned well, my boy, that nothing ‘possessed’ me. While all this was going on I was sitting in the dark, on an uncomfortably hard chair, and pretending to pray. … To pray, mind you!” He spoke with a sort of surprised pleasure, as at a discovery. “For Darworth. Then was when my sense of humor got started. …
“And that brings me to my final point. I want you to talk to those people in there: Marion and Aunt Anne in particular. I want you to see what’s happened to the atmosphere, and you may get a shock. How do you think they’re acting?”
“Acting?”
“Yes.” He turned round excitedly and flung his cigarette away before he faced me again. “How do you think they’ve taken Darworth’s cropper? Is he a martyr? Are they prostrated? NO!—They’re relieved, I tell you! Relieved! All, maybe, except Ted, who’ll go on believing Darworth was done in by a spook to the end of his days. … But it’s as though some hypnotic influence had got off them at last. Blake, what’s the insane, upended psychology of the whole business? What’s—?”
Masters thrust his head out of the door at this juncture, and hissed mysteriously. He looked even more worried. He said:
“We’ve a lot to do. Police surgeon—photographers—reports. And now we’re testing. Look here, sir, will you go back to the house and just chat with those people? Don’t examine them, exactly. Let ’em talk, if they like. Hold them there until I come. And no information, beyond he’s dead. None of the things we can’t explain; eh? Eh?”
“How’s it going, Inspector?” Halliday inquired, somewhat genially.
Masters turned his head. The words had jarred.
“It’s murder, you know,” he answered heavily, and with a faint inflection that might have been suspicion. “You ever see a trial, sir? Ah, just so. I shouldn’t call it funny. …”
Halliday, as though on a sudden resolution, walked up to the door and faced him. He hunched up his shoulders, in that old gesture of his, and fixed Masters with his rather bovine brown eyes.
“Inspector,” he said, and hesitated—as though he were rehearsing a set speech. Then he went on with a rush: “Inspector, I hope everybody will understand everybody else before we start this thing. I know it’s murder. I’ve thought it all over; I know the notoriety, the unpleasantness, the sticky nastiness that we’ll have to go through; oh, yes, and what a lot of soft-headed dupes we shall look at a coroner’s inquest. … Can’t you let us off anything? I’m not blind. I know the implication will be that somebody up there stabbed Darworth. But you know better, don’t you? You know it wasn’t one of his own disciples. Good God, who would kill him? Except, of course”—his finger moved up slowly and touched his own chest, and his eyes opened wide.
“Ah!” said Masters in a colorless voice. “Possibly, possibly. Why, I shall have to do my duty, Mr. Halliday. I’m afraid I can’t spare anybody. Unless— you’re not meaning to give yourself up for murder, are you?”
“Not at all. All I meant …”
“Why, then,” said Masters, with a deprecating motion of his head. “Why, then—! Excuse me, sir. I’ve got to get back to work.”
The muscles tightened down Halliday’s jaws. He was smiling. Taking me by the arm, he strode off towards the house. “Yes. Yes, the inspector’s got his eye on one of us, very definitely. And do I care, my son? I do not!” He threw back his head, as though he were laughing to heaven, and I could feel him shaking with that silent and rather terrible mirth. “And now I’ll tell you why I don’t. I told you we were sitting in the dark: the lot of us. Now if Masters can’t fix’ the slashing on young Joseph—which is what he’ll try to do, first off—then he’ll pitch on one of us. You see? He’ll say that during twenty-odd minutes of darkness, one of us got up and went out. …”
“And did anybody?”
“I don’t know,” He answered very coolly. “There was undoubtedly somebody who got up from a chair; I heard it creak. Also, the door of the room opened and closed. But that’s all I could swear to.”
Apparently he did not yet know the impossible (or difficult, if you prefer the word) circumstances surrounding Darworth’s murder. But it struck me that the picture he had been presenting had elements rather worse than the supernatural.
“Well?” I demanded. “Nothing very laughable about that, you know. It’s not altogether reasonable, on the face of it. Nobody but a lunatic would risk a chance like that, in a room full of people. But as for being uproariously funny—”
“Oh, yes, it is.” His face was pale, almost inhuman in the starlight, and split by that fantastic jollity. But his head jerked down. He grew serious. “Because, you see, Marion and I were sitting in the dark holding hands. By God, won’t it sound amusing in a coroner’s court? Clapham Common on parade. I think I hear the giggles. … But it will have to be told; because that, my boy, is what is known as an alibi. You see, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to the rest of them that they may be suspected of murder. I can tell you it’s jolly well occurred to me. However, that doesn’t matter. So long as my own light-o’-life can present a
brow of radiant innocence … why, they may lock up old Featherton, or Aunt Anne, or anybody they like.”
There was a hail from ahead of us, and Halliday hurried forward. From the old kitchen where I had read the letters, the light of the candles was still shining out into the passage. And silhouetted against it in the back door was the figure of a tall girl in a long coat. She stumbled down the steps, and Halliday had her in his arms.
I heard little dry sobs of breathing. The girl said: “He’s dead, Dean. He’s dead! And I ought to feel sorry, but I don’t.”
Her trembling shook the words. The flickers of light made dazzling her yellow hair, against the gaunt doorway and the gray time-bitten house. When Halliday began to say something, all he could do was shake her shoulders; and what he actually stammered out, gruffly, was:
“Look here, you can’t come down in this mud! Your shoes—”
“It’s all right. I’ve got galoshes; I found some. I—what am I saying? Oh, my dear, come in and talk to them. …” Raising her head, she saw me, and looked at me steadily. All the scenes in this puzzle had seemed fragments in half-light: a face shadowed, a gleam on teeth, a gesture indicated, as Marion Latimer was now. She pushed herself away from Halliday.
“You’re a policeman, aren’t you, Mr. Blake?” she asked quietly. “Or a sort of one, anyway, Dean says. Please come with us. I’d rather have you than that awful man who was here a while ago. …”
We went up the steps, the girl stumbling in heavy galoshes much too large for her; but at the door to the kitchen I gestured the others to stop. I was interested in that kitchen. Joseph was sitting there.
He sat on the packing-case, as I had done when I read the manuscript; his elbows on the work-bench and fingers propped under his ears. His eyes were half shut, and he breathed thinly. The light of the four candles brought his face strongly out of the gloom; his face, his thin, grimy hands and meager neck.
The Plague Court Murders Page 8