The Plague Court Murders

by John Dickson Carr

  “Get down to cases,” growled the major.

  “Right. Now, I’ll admit we learned all that a little too late. So I’m goin’ to start at the beginning and follow out the story, with what could have been deduced from it even if I had first tumbled to Joseph. We’ll assume we don’t know Glenda Darworth is Joseph; we don’t know anything; we’re only sittin’ and thinkin’ about the facts. …

  “We’ve decided that Darworth had a confederate, who was goin’ to help him stage a fake attack by Louis Playge’s ghost. That confederate was to go to the museum and take the dagger. The little trick of moving the neck in the manner of Louis Playge was meant to catch the attendant’s eye; Darworth knew that the papers would play it up, and it was fine publicity for his scheme. We’ve even decided how the real murder was committed; with rock-salt bullets fired by somebody on the roof through one of those grated windows. If Darworth had cleaned up his lathe, and if Ted hadn’t so casually mentioned those pieces of sculpture, it might have been a snag. Lord!” grunted H.M., taking a hasty drink of his punch, “Burn me, but I was afraid you’d find it out for yourselves, I was!” He glared at us. “If one of you had spoiled my effect, hanged if I wouldn’t have backed out of the case altogether. I don’t mind helpin’ you, but you got to let the old veteran have his way, or he won’t play. Humph. I even hadda tell Masters not to taste the stuff, or he’d have found out it was salt, and even his brain might ’a’ been started workin’. Purpf. Bah. Well!

  “Now, that’s all we know, you understand. There’s where we begin lookin’ for a murderer.

  “We look around. And what do we see but the obvious one starin’ us in the face—the person who would be a confederate, and was more likely to be than anybody else: namely, Joseph. So why don’t we suspect him and drag him under the spotlight straightaway?

  “First, because the apparent boy is a weak-minded drug-addict, under Darworth’s domination, and certainly full of morphine after the murder was committed.

  “Second, because we’ve been told Darworth keeps him as a dummy or front for his activities, and Joseph knows nothing.

  “Third, because apparently he has a perfect alibi; and was sitting playing cards with McDonnell the whole time.”

  H.M. chuckled. He got his pipe lit after a herculean effort; inhaled soothing smoke; and his stare became vacant again.

  “Boys, it was rather an ingenious set-up, d’ye see. First the obvious thing, then smeared over with a number of hints or facts which would make people say, ‘Poor old Joseph! Framed; not a doubt of it.’ Oh, I know. I fell for it myself, for a few hours. And then I began thinkin’. It was a funny thing, but, when I read over all that testimony again, not one of the people in that circle—who’d known Joseph for nearly a year—had ever suspected him of being a drug-addict before that night. In fact, it came as a shock to everybody. Now, throughout all that time, it might have been possible for Joseph and Darworth to have concealed this; though it would have been difficult; but, most of all, that constant doping of Joseph would have seemed unnecessary. Why keep shooting him full of morphine before a séance—ain’t that a highly expensive, dangerous, and complex way of puttin’ a person to sleep, when it could have been done as well with cheap legitimate drops from the chemist’s, and leave no dangerous after-affects? What’s to be gained by it? All you do is create a drug-addict who may babble and tilt the beans all over the floor at any minute! Why not even ordinary hypnosis, if Joseph were such an easy subject? It struck me as a fishy, roundabout way of attaining a very ordinary object: that is, to keep the boy quiet in the medium’s cabinet while Darworth was manipulating strings. You wouldn’t even need to put a weak mind to sleep in order to do that.

  “So I asked myself, ‘Look here,’ I said, ‘where did that suggestion of his being a drug-addict first come from?’ It was first mentioned by Sergeant McDonnell, who’d been investigating the case; but by nobody else until it was backed by Joseph’s obviously showing himself under the influence, and babbling.

  “Then it struck me, lads, that of all the inconsistent, dubious, and suspicious things we had heard in this case, that story of Joseph’s was the worst. First, he said that he had pinched the hypodermic needle and morphine from Darworth, and given himself a dose. Now, that’s wildly unlikely, as you’ll admit. …”

  Major Featherton, stroking his white mustache, interrupted:

  “But dammit, Henry, you yourself said, in this, office, it was because—look here, what was it?—that he’d done it with Darworth’s connivance. …”

  “And don’t the flaw of that belief immediately strike you?” demanded H.M., who hates to be reminded of his mistakes. “All right, all right; I admit it didn’t strike me for a minute, but don’t it shout aloud in the universe? Darworth, according to Joseph, wants Joseph to keep on the watch for somebody who may do him harm. That’s what Joseph said to Ken and Masters; that was his story. Well, can you think of anything more unreasonable than allowing somebody to shoot himself full of morphine in order to keep on the watch? Either way you looked at it, the thing was fishy. It didn’t ring true. … But there was another explanation, so obvious and simple that it was a long time before it occurred to me. Suppose old Joseph wasn’t a drug-addict at all; suppose all the others had been right, and all we had was his own word, which we accepted too easily? Suppose that whole tale was spun up to avert suspicion? Granted that he’d taken a dose of morphine then—he couldn’t counterfeit the actual physical symptoms—still, the symptoms of the addict, the twitching hand, the wandering eye, the jerks and babblings, could have been put forward by a good actor and corroborated by our own instinctive belief that a person won’t admit he’s a drug-addict unless he actually is. Neat psychology, son; not at all bad.

  “As I say, I was sittin’ and thinkin’. …

  “So I asked myself, ‘Here,’ I said, ‘let’s take that as a workin’ hypothesis; is there anything to support it?’

  It’d prove, for instance, that Joseph was very far from being the idiot he pretended, and assumin’ the colors of a dangerous character, if we could prove it.

  “Look at his story again. He said that Darworth was nervous about being attacked by somebody in that circle. We had it from everybody’s testimony that Darworth wasn’t nervous at all about goin’ out to keep a vigil in that house; that whatever it was he feared didn’t seem to come, from here; but let that pass. … What I knew, as I told you, was Darworth’s plan: the confederate who was to stage a fake attack on him. Therefore, if the confederate were a member of that circle in the front room, was it likely that he’d deliberately have asked Joseph to keep on the watch? God love us, gents, Joseph might ’a’ seen the confederate, raised a row, and the beans upset again! On whichever side you looked at Joseph’s story, it was equally dubious. But it was precisely the story he might have told, to protect himself, if he had been that confederate; if he had murdered Darworth instead of assisting him; and he had shot morphine into himself after the murder to provide an alibi.

  “Keep starin’ at that rather sinister-lookin’ person now, and examine the second reason why we didn’t, suspect him—the statement that he was only Darworth’s Front, to take the blame in case of mishaps. Again, who suggested that to us? Only McDonnell, who’d been investigatin’, and Joseph who admitted it. And we accepted it … my hat, how meekly we accepted it! We believed Joseph simply walked about in a daze, while Darworth did all the work and the lad knew nothin’.

  “But then I remembered—the stone flower-box.”

  The smoke of our pipes and cigars mingled in a haze with the steam of the punch-bowl. Beyond the glow of the desk-lamp, H.M.’s face was sardonic in gloom. A late taxi honked on the Embankment, sharp in the silence of the morning. Halliday leaned forward.

  “That’s what I want to know about!” Halliday said. “That flower-box that dropped out of the ceiling or somewhere, and damn near smashed my head. Masters talked very easily and grandly about what a stale trick it was. Right-ho. But the stale trick near
ly finished me, and if it was that swine Joseph— or Glenda Darworth—if she did it—”

  “Sure she did, son,” said H.M., with a heavy gesture. “Ladle me out some more of Father Flaherty’s medicine, will you? Umph. Ha. Thanks. … Now, cast your mind back to that time. You and Ken and Masters were standin’ over close to the side of the staircase, weren’t you? In fact, you had your back to it. Right. And up came the Major here, and Ted Latimer, and Joseph a little way behind them. So? Tell me: what was the floor made of?”

  “The floor? Stone. Stone or brick; stone, I think.”

  “Uh-huh. But I mean the part you were standin’ on then, at the back of the hall where the old flooring hadn’t been taken up? Heavy boards, hey? Pretty loose; made the staircase rattle?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I remember how they squeaked when Masters took a step.”

  “And the landing of the staircase was just over young Halliday’s head, hey? And there was a handrail? Quite, quite. It’s the old Anne Robinson trick. Haven’t you ever noticed, in an old hall with a shaky stair, how if you accidentally tread on the right board connected with the staircase, the stair will shake, and the handrail of a landing will tremble? Now if a heavy weight had been balanced across that handrail so that a hair-line shake would turn its equilibrium—?”

  After a silence he went on:

  “Ted and the Major, son, were ahead of you; they’d gone on. Joseph was following a few paces behind. And he didn’t tread on the right board by accident. …

  “The more you sort of scrutinize old Joseph, the less he begins to look like an unfortunate marionette dancin’ on wires without knowing what goes on. Look at him! There he is, very skinny and not tall for a young man; in fact, you’d consider him small. There are the fine wrinkles in his neck, his hair cropped short and colored red, his freckles and his snub nose and rather too broad mouth; there’s his thin dead voice like a boy’s; and above all—I want you to remember this—his loud cheek suits, always distin guishable at a distance. Very much like a kid, weighing maybe ninety pounds. …

  “And then there was a curious thing which Masters noticed just before the stone flower-box dropped; any of the rest o’ you see it? He was makin’ funny motions with his hands, as though he were brushin’ and touching his face, and he stopped when they turned a light on him. …

  “So I thought, ‘Look here, is it possible that this is any sort of disguise?’ You see, he’d just been out in the rain without a hat. And I wondered if he might be afraid”

  “Well?”

  “Well, say—that his freckles might wash off,” replied H.M. “That was only the basis of an idea, still hazy. But I was sittin’ and thinkin’, and I remembered that tree in the yard. You know the tree? Masters said that a very agile person could easily have got from the top of the wall to the tree, and from the tree to the little house. And McDonnell pointed out how rotten the tree was, and showed a broken branch Where it’d been tested. … So it might have broken, under a person of normal weight. I say it might, son, because Masters accepted that statement too. But there was only one person in the whole house light enough to have climbed that tree without breaking it: the innocent ‘boy,’ Joseph.

  “Now, would Joseph have had the skill and agility to do that; or to shoot straight enough through that window to inflict exactly those wounds? What becomes of this stupid, drug-ridden child now? All I suspect, for the moment, is that he’s not what he pretends to be; and pretty definitely there’s a disguise of some sort. I ask myself, ‘Look here,’ I say, ‘while that popcorn is rattlin’ around in the tin, look at something else. What’s this feller’s motive, if he did kill Darworth? He’s working with Darworth to befoozle old Lady Benning and her crowd—why does he depart from the plan and shoot Darworth, which seems rather a fat-headed thing to do? ’Twasn’t an accident; those last two bullets were intended to make mutton of the whiskery crook. Why kill the source of his income? The only one who inherits any of Darworth’s money is his wife. …’

  “Wife! You’d be surprised what a revelation started to show glimmers in the old man’s mind. … Let’s see, what was Darworth’s purpose in staging this show? He might have told a confederate it was to proclaim the truth of occultism to the world; to make his name reverberate … but it wasn’t. Oh, no. ‘By God,’ says I to myself, ‘he was after the Latimer girl. He was goin’ to propose marriage to her. But he’s got a wife in Nice—a sharp, hard-headed wench who’s frozen him into marriage at just the right time; who knows a deal too much about the past hanky-panky. How is she goin’ to take all this?”

  H.M.’s pipe described a curious motion in the air, as though he were sleepily tracing out somebody’s features.

  “Provocative-lookin’ gal, by her pictures. Thin, very. Age thirty-odd; time for little wrinkles, but not many. Not tall, but ’ud look tall on high heels. You fellers married? Ever notice how small your wives looked the first time you saw ’em without them heels? Um. Funny, too, how a mass o’ black hair changes the expression of a face, or what cosmetics do to it. First I thought, ‘Burn me, I’d advise that gal to be awful damn careful. Because why? Because our smilin’ Darworth has already disposed of one wife, by poison or throat-cuttin’ or whatnot, and if he’s got his heart clean set on orange blossoms again—well, if I were the wife, I’d look under beds now and then, and stay away from side-streets after dark.’ ” H.M. gave a long sniff. Then his eyes fixed on us. “ ‘Unless,’ I said to myself, ‘I simply beat him to it!’ ”

  He pointed his pipe at us.

  “Did somebody tell you how Glenda Watson started her career at the age of fifteen? In a travelin’ circus and sideshow; ah, you heard it, did you? I’d be very much surprised to hear that negotiating a wall and a tree, or the use of a middle-caliber firearm, would cause her a great deal of difficulty. … A versatile gel, and what a woman! She’s got talents, and she’s got It, or they wouldn’t have fallen for her when Darworth’s money wangled her a lead-in the actin’ company at Nice. She had to destroy the sex-appeal during the months she played Joseph; but she didn’t play him long at a time. … Pity to keep her hair cut short and dyed; but she had a very luxuriant black wig to replace her real hair when she went out to take the air. Remember the mysterious woman who was seen goin’ in and out of Magnolia Cottage? You see, there was one conquest she had to complete as Glenda Darworth, and that—”

  “This is all very well!” exploded Major Featherton, “but it doesn’t get us farther. Dammit, there’s one difficulty, I repeat, you can’t get over. She had an alibi; she was directly under the eye of a reliable man all the time she might have been out killing Darworth in the stone house. … You can’t get around that solid fact. What’s more, we were all in the room just across the hall, in absolute silence—she and the sergeant were over across from us—and we didn’t hear a thing”.

  “I know you didn’t,” said H.M. composedly. “That’s just it. You didn’t hear a single damned whisper out of that room. And that’s what made me suspicious.

  “Now I want those shrewd minds of yours, all mellowed and primed, to consider a variety of funny coincidences. … First, immediately after the murder, a newspaper photographer was allowed to climb up on the roof of the stone house: a thing that should have and could have been stopped, because if there were any traces of the murderer’s footprints on that roof, they’d have been messed up. Second, somebody walked round on the wall to test that rotten tree, and would have messed up more footprints. Third, in spite of Masters’ efforts, the story of this being a ghost-murder—inexplicable, nothing but a supernatural thing—splashed out into the newspapers. …”

  Halliday got up slowly out of his chair. …

  “Fourth, somebody who was very clever had been assigned to keep an eye on Darworth’s movements, and would have had a better chance than we to discover that ‘Joseph,’ living in a house at Brixton, was really the fascinating Mrs. Darworth long before we had an inkling of it.

  “Fifth,” continued H.M., and his voice grew l
ess sleepy, “fifth, my fatheads, have you forgotten that séance of automatic-writing at Bill Featherton’s? Have you forgotten that séance at which ‘Joseph’ wasn’t even present? Have you forgotten that there the paper saying ‘I know where Elsie Fenwick is buried’ had been slipped in among Darworth’s other papers, and scared him silly because he realized that somebody besides his wife—somebody there—some unseen, deadly person according to Darworth’s ideas—knew the secret? Why should he have been frightened merely if ‘Joseph’ slipped in a paper like that? He knew ‘Joseph’ knew it, didn’t he?” Suddenly H.M. leaned across the table. “And who was, admittedly, the only person who could have palmed the paper off on Darworth; bein’, as he himself admitted, an expert at parlor magic?”

  In the enormous silence Halliday knocked his fist against his forehead. He said:

  “My God, are you telling us that that fellow McDonnell—”

  And H.M. went on drowsily:

  “Bert McDonnell didn’t commit the murder, of course. He was an accessory, but not an important one. He wouldn’t have been needed at all by Glenda Darworth if—unexpectedly—Masters hadn’t shown up at Plague Court. That tore it. McDonnell was watchin’ in the yard to see nothing went wrong. When he saw Masters he had to intervene; had to get Joseph away somewhere out of Masters’ sight; and he was so nervous (wasn’t he?) that he almost bungled it. Who suggested that Masters should go upstairs in the house and watch while he questioned Joseph alone? Who deliberately led you in the wrong direction every time you showed a flash of intelligence? Who swore to you that tree in the yard couldn’t stand any weight? Who said, for a reason you didn’t question, that all it meant was that Louis Playge was buried beneath it?”

  H.M. saw the expressions on our faces, and scowled.