The Plague Court Murders

by John Dickson Carr

  It was an immature face, immature and small-featured, with freckles staining the muddy skin across the flattish nose and round the large, loose mouth. The red hair—of a light shade, and cut short—was plastered against his forehead. He might have been nineteen or twenty years old, and looked thirteen. On the work-bench before him were spread out the papers I had been reading, but he was not reading them. A soiled pack of playing-cards had been spread out fanwise across them. He was peering dully at one candle, swaying a little; the loose mouth moved, slobbering, but he did not speak. His clothes, of a violent reddish check pattern, made him look even more weird.

  “Joseph!” I said, not loudly. “Joseph!”

  One hand fell with a flat smack on the table. He rolled his body round slowly, and peered up. … It was not that the face was witless; once upon a time it might have been highly intelligent. A film was over his eyes, whose pupils were contracted nearly to invisibility, and yellowish round the iris. When they came to focus on me, he cringed away. A smile was parodied on his big mouth. When I had seen him a few hours before, by the beam of a flashlight, he had seemed quiet and dull and incurious enough. But not like this.

  I repeated his name, and went slowly towards him. “It’s all right, Joseph. It’s all right. I’m a doctor, Joseph. …”

  “Don’t you touch me!” he said. He did not speak at all loudly, but he gave such a jerk backwards that I thought he meant to duck down under the bench.

  “Don’t you touch me, now. …”

  I got my fingers on his wrist, by dint of keeping his eye (an excellent hypnotic subject); he trembled, and kept jerking back. To judge by the pulse, whoever had given him that dose of morphine had gone a little too far. He was not in danger, however, for he was obviously accustomed to it.

  “Of course. You’re ill, Joseph. You’re often ill, aren’t you? And so you get medicine, of course. …”

  “Please, sir.” He shrank again, with a ducking motion, and an ingratiating look. “Please, sir, I feel quite well now, thank you, sir. Will you let me go?” Suddenly he became voluble. It was the voice of a young schoolboy blurting out a confession to a master. “I know now! You want to find out. Please, I didn’t mean any harm! I know he told me I shouldn’t ought to have any medicine tonight, but I took it anyway, because I know where he keeps the case. So I took the case … but I only took the medicine a very little while ago, sir! Only a very little while ago. …”

  “Medicine you put in your arm, Joseph?”

  “Yes, sir!” His hand moved towards his inside pocket, with the child’s hurry to show you everything once he has confessed, and lighten the blame. “I’ll show you. Here—”

  “Mr. Darworth gives you this medicine, Joseph?”

  “Yes, sir. When there is to be a séance, and then I go into a trance. That’s what makes the forces gather; but of course I don’t know that, because I never see anything. …” Joseph burst out laughing. “I say, I shouldn’t be telling you this. I was told never to tell. Who are you? Besides, I thought it would be better if I took twice as big a dose tonight, because I liked the medicine, and I’d like it twice as well if I took twice as big a dose. Wouldn’t I?” His smeary eyes came round at me with a sort of pounce, eagerly.

  I wanted to look round and see how Halliday and the girl were taking this, but I was afraid to lose his eye. That extra grain had fuddled him into speech. It was a blunder that might bring us on the truth.

  “Of course you would, Joseph” (he looked gratified), “and I don’t blame you. Tell me, what’s your whole name: all of it, you know?”

  “You don’t know that? Then you can’t be a doctor—!” He moved back a little, changed his mind, and said: “You know it. Joseph Dennis.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “I know! You’re a new doctor. That’s it. I live at 401B Loughborough Road, Brixton.”

  “Do you have any parents, Joseph?”

  “There’s Mrs. Sweeney—” he said doubtfully. “Parents? I don’t think so. I don’t remember, except I never had enough to eat, much. All I remember is a little girl I was going to get married to, that lived in a house and had yellow hair, but I don’t know what happened to her, sir. There’s Mrs. Sweeney. We were each of us only eight years old, though, so of course we couldn’t.”

  “How did you come to know Mr. Darworth?”

  This question took more time. I gathered that Mrs. Sweeney was a guardian of his, who had known Mr. Darworth once. It was Mrs. Sweeney who told him he had great psychic powers. She went out one day and came back with Mr. Darworth “in a coat with a fur collar on, and a shiny hat, and rode in a long car that had a stork on the bonnet.” They had talked about him, and somebody had said, “He’ll never blackmail.” Joseph thought this was three years ago.

  Again—while Joseph was giving an involved description of the parlor at 401B Loughborough Road, with special reference to the bead curtains at the door and the gilt-clasped Bible on the table—I wanted to look round at my companions. How the acolytes would take this tolerably clear evidence about Darworth was uncertain: the difficulty might be in persuading him to repeat it afterwards. Besides, I could tell that he was nearly at the limit of his volubility. A few minutes more, and he would turn sullen and fearful, possibly savage. I pressed him on gently, thus:

  “No, of course you needn’t worry about what Mr. Darworth says, Joseph. The doctor’ll tell him you took that medicine because you had to—”

  “Ah-h!”

  “—and the doctor’ll tell him, naturally, you couldn’t be expected to do what Mr. Darworth told you to do. … Let’s see, old man: what was it he told you to do, now?”

  Joseph put a grubby thumb-nail in his mouth and nibbled at it. He lowered his voice portentously, almost as though he were imitating Darworth. “To listen, sir. To listen. That’s what he said, please, sir.” Then Joseph nodded several times, and looked triumphant.

  “Listen?”

  To listen to them. The people here. He said not to stay with them at all, and if they wanted a sitting to refuse it, but to keep listening. Please, sir, that’s true. He said he wasn’t sure, but that somebody might want to hurt him, and come creeping out. …” The boy’s eyes grew more hazy; evidently Darworth had described that process of “creeping out” with sharp and hideous detail. Also evidently, Darworth was no stranger to the medical use of hypnotic suggestion. “Creeping out. … And I was to see who it was. …”

  “What then, Joseph?”

  “He told me how good he had been to me, and the money he had given Mrs. Sweeney for me; and that my mind would know it, and if anybody did I should know who it was. … But I took my medicine, you see, sir, and then all I wanted to do was play cards. After a while the cards with the pictures on them all seem to come alive, especially the two red queens. You hold them to the light and turn them round, and then you can see new colors on them you didn’t see before. …”

  “Did he expect anybody to come creeping out, Joseph?”

  “He said—” The weak mind groped obscurely within itself. He had already turned round, and was picking up the cards arid sorting them over in eager haste. A thin hand plucked out the queen of diamonds. As he looked up again, his eyes wandered past me.

  “Please, sir, I won’t talk any more,” he said in a sort of whine. He got up and backed away. “You can beat me, if you like, the way they used to, but I won’t talk any more.”

  With a jerk he had slid past the packing case, holding the card jealously, and retreated into the shadows.

  I turned round sharply. Marion Latimer and Halliday were standing close together, her hand on his arm: both of them staring at Joseph’s white face writhing and retreating towards the wall. Halliday’s eyes were heavy-lidded; his mouth showed either pity or contempt, and he held the girl closer. I thought that she shuddered, that relief had weakened her, that it was as though her eyes were growing accustomed to the light in here; even that her angular beauty had grown softer like the loosening in the sharp waves of
her blonde hair. But, looking past them, I saw that the audience had been augmented.

  There was a figure in the doorway.

  “Indeed!” said Lady Benning harshly.

  Her upper lip was pulled up. In contrast to the primness of the waved white hair and the black velvet band round her throat, her face was full of darkish wrinkles. The black eyes were on mine. She was leaning, incongruously, on an umbrella, and with this she abruptly made a gesture and struck the wall of the passage behind. “Come into the front room, you,” she cried shrilly, “and ask which one of us killed Roger Darworth. … Oh, my God, James! James!” said Lady Benning, and suddenly began to cry.

  CHAPTER VIII

  In the front room I faced five people.

  For the moment the most curious study was the self-assured old lady breaking to pieces like the wax-flower placidness of her face. It was as though she had tumbled down and could not get up: and there existed a very real physical cause behind the mental. Either slightly lame, or afflicted as I judged with some slight paralytic weakness of the legs, Lady Benning remained a stately little figure (got up deftly into her Watteau marquise’s role, as though to have her portrait painted) while she only sat in the chimney corner and nodded against her red cloak. But once she got up, and moved uncertainly, you saw only a decaying, spiteful, very bewildered, elderly woman, who had lost a beloved nephew. Such at least was my impression, though you sensed in her a more baffling quality than in any of the others.

  She sat in the same chair as before, beside the smoky fire that had long ago gone out, under the six candles in the ruined room. Nor would she use a handkerchief; she sat with a hand pressed to her pouched and smeary eyes, her breast heaving, and would not speak. Major Featherton stood over her, glaring at me. Ted Latimer was on the other side of the fireplace, and he had a poker in his hand.

  Yet to face these people down was so easy that you felt uncomfortable, for the most palpable thing in that room—standing behind each person’s shoulder—was fear.

  “Now, sir!” boomed Major Featherton, as though he would get down to business at once. But he stopped.

  A rather imposing figure, the major, when seen at last in full light. He had that look of being tilted slightly backwards, compressed into a correct overcoat whose tailoring almost hid his paunch. His shiny, bald head (much at variance with the port-wine-colored flabby face, big nose, and jowls swelling over the collar as he spoke) was inclined on one side. One hand was oratorically bent behind his back; with the other he pulled at his white mustache. Pale blue eyes studied me from under grizzled brows that needed combing. He coughed. A curious, pacifying expression spread over his face, as though he were about to say, “Ahem!” At the back of all this hesitancy you perceived sheer bewilderment; and also something fundamentally nervous, honest, and solidly British. I expected him to burst out with: “Oh, dammit, let somebody else do the talking!”

  Lady Benning drew a sobbing breath, and he put a hand gently on her shoulder.

  “They tell us, sir, that Darworth’s dead,” he said, with an attempt at a growl. “Well, it’s a bad business. A confoundedly bad business, I don’t mind telling you. How did it happen?”

  “He was stabbed,” I said. “Out there in the stone house, as you know.”

  “With what?” Ted Latimer asked swiftly. “With Louis Playge’s dagger?”

  Ted had pulled out a chair with a quick gesture, and sat down with his legs straddling the back of it. He was trying to be very cool. His tie was disarranged, and there were smears of dirt at the edges of his carefully brushed, wiry, yellowish hair.

  I nodded.

  “Well, damn it, say something!” rasped the major. He brought his hand up from Lady Benning’s shoulder, and put it down again more softly. “Come, now. None of us feel too pleasant about this. When the friend that Dean introduced, that fellow Masters, turned out to be nothing else than a police officer—”

  Ted glared at Halliday, who was unconcernedly lighting a cigarette; but Ted met his sister’s eye, and jerked his hand before his face as though he were brushing away a fly.

  “—that,” said the major, “was bad enough. It wasn’t like you, Dean. It was rank violation. It was—”

  “I should call it foresight, sir,” Halliday interrupted. “Don’t you think I was justified?”

  Featherton opened and shut his mouth. “Oh, look here! I’m not up to all these tricks, confound it! I’m a plain man, and I like to know where I am. If the ladies will pardon me for saying so, that’s the truth. I haven’t approved of these goings-on, never did approve of ’em, and, by Gad, I never will!” He was considerably on edge, but he seemed to grow penitent as he glanced down at Lady Benning, and turned his tirade at me. “Now, come, sir. After all! I hope we all speak the same language here. Lady Benning knows your sister.” (He spoke with a sort of accusation.) “What’s more, Dean tells me you were connected with Department 3. You know, M.I.D. Why, confound it, I know your Chief there; the one you call Mycroft. Know him well. Surely you don’t want us tangled up in any of the rotten mess that’s bound to follow this?”

  There was only one way to get these people to speak frankly. When I had finished explaining, the major cleared his throat.

  “Good. Ah, good. Not bad, I mean. What you mean’s this: You’re not a policeman. You won’t press any inquiries you think are absurd—about us. Hey? You’ll try to help if that police office, humph, gets gay …”

  I nodded. Marion Latimer was staring at me with a curious expression in her dark-blue eyes, as though she had remembered something.

  She said in a clear voice: “And also you think the key to this affair lies in—in—what did you say?—some associate or association of Darworth aside from us. Say in the past …”

  “Rot!” said Ted, and let out a high laugh such as urchins give when they have smashed a window and run.

  “That’s what I meant. But before we can go on, one question must be answered by all of you, and answered frankly. …”

  “Ask, by all means,” said the major.

  I looked round the group. “Then can any of you honestly say now that he still believes Darworth was killed by a supernatural agency?”

  There is, or used to be, a game called Truth. It is popular among adolescents, with an end towards drawing out all the giggling secrets; but a grown-up with a curious turn of mind will do well to encourage it sometimes among his own associates, and observe closely the result. Watch their eyes and hands, the way they form their sentences, the devious turn of their lies or else their shattering frankness; and much is to be learned of their natures. … After asking that question, I was reminded of nothing so much as a group of adolescents playing with an uneasy question in a game of Truth.

  They looked at each other. Even Lady Benning had stiffened. Her jewel-gaudy hands were still pressed over her eyes, but she might have been peering out between the fingers; she began to tremble, then uttered what might have been a moan or a sob, and slid back against the gaudier red-lined cloak.

  “NO!” said Major Featherton explosively.

  It broke the tension. Halliday murmured, “Good man!’Speak up, old girl. Banish the hobgoblins. Tell ’em all about it.”

  “I—I don’t know,” said Marion, with a dull and incredulous half-smile at the fireplace. She looked up. “I don’t honestly know, but I don’t think so. You see, Mr. Blake, you’ve got us into such a position that we shall look most awful fools if we say, ‘No.’—Wait! I’ll put it another way. I don’t know whether or not I believe in the supernatural. I rather fancy I do. There’s something in this house—” her eyes moved round quickly. “I—I haven’t been myself, and there may be something terrible and unnatural here. But if you ask me whether I think Mr. Darworth is an impostor, the answer is YES! After hearing what that Dennis boy had to say. …” She shuddered.

  “Then, my dear Miss Latimer,” boomed the major, massaging his jaw, “why, in the name of heaven—”

  “You see?” she said quietly, an
d smiled. “That’s what I meant. I didn’t like that man. I think I hated him. It was the way he talked, the manner he had; oh, I can’t explain it, except that I’ve heard of people getting in the power of—of doctors before. He was a kind of super-doctor who poisoned you so that—” her eyes slid quickly to Halliday, and as quickly darted away, “so that: well, it’s horrible to talk of, but you could almost see maggots crawling on people you knew—and loved! And the odd thing is that it’s like a spell in the story-books. He’s dead. And we’re all free, as I wanted to be free.”

  Her cheeks were flushed, and her speech rapid to incoherence. Ted let out a whinny of laughter.

  He said: “I say, angel, I shouldn’t go on like that, you know. You’re only providing motives for murder.”

  “Well, well,” said Halliday, and took the cigarette out of his mouth. “Want your face knocked off, do you?”

  Ted studied him. Ted was very much the young intellectual then, drawn back a little, supercilious, touching his sprouting mustache. He would have been ludicrous had it not been for the fighting fanaticism of his eyes.

  “Oh, if it comes to that, old son, motives for all of us. With the possible exception of myself. And that’s unfortunate, because I haven’t much objection to being accused. …” It was the very familiar aloof Chelsea strain, and I think he caught Halliday’s slight grimace, for his face hardened; he went on rapidly: “Especially as they’ll never be able to arrest anybody. Yes, I believed in Darworth, and I still do! It seems to me you’re all doing a hell of a lot of shuffling and sliding, the moment someone says, ‘Coppers!’ Let ’em come! I’m glad of this, in a way. It’ll throw a demonstration of the truth at the whole world, and the morons who’ve always tried to block every bit of real scientific progress “He swallowed hard. “All right, all right! Say I’m potty, but this will have demonstrated it to the world. Now isn’t it worth a man’s life—and what’s a man’s life compared to scientific—”