John Carr - The Plague Court Murders

In the opening scene of The Plague Court Murders, Dean Halliday asks the narrator, Ken Blake, "to spend a night in a haunted house:' Blake "felt an anticipatory pleasure." A few years after writing these words, John Dickson Carr was asked to spend a night in a haunted house owned by his friend, the novelist J. B. Priestley. He too felt an anticipatory pleasure, and was disappointed when nothing even mildly ghostly occurred. But plenty of ghostly things will happen on the following pages, and no reader will be disappointed.

Douglas G. Greene Norfolk, Virginia December 1989

Series consultant Douglas G. Greene is busily at work on the authorized biography of John Dickson Carr. He is also putting the finishing touches to the first volume of the collected short fiction of that author which will be entitled Fell and Foul Play, and will be published in the fall of 1990 by IPL:

I

THE HOUSE IN PLAGUE COURT

OLD MERRIVALE, that astute and garrulous lump who sits with his feet on the desk at the War Office, has been growling again for somebody to write the story of the Plague Court murders; chiefly, it is believed, to glorify himself. He does not have so much glory nowadays. His department has ceased to be called the Counter Espionage Service; it has become merely the M.I.D., and its work is somewhat less dangerous than taking photographs of the Nelson Monument.

I have pointed out to him that neither of us has any connection with the police, and that, since I left his service some years ago, I have not even his excuse. Besides, our friend Masters-now Chief Inspector of the Criminal Investigation Department-might not like it. I was, therefore, inveigled into playing a cold poker-hand to determine whether I should write it, or somebody else. I forget who the other person was to be, but it was not Sir Henry Merrivale.

My own connection with the case began on the night of September 6, 1930: the rainy night when Dean Halliday walked into the smoking-room of the Noughts-and-Crosses Club and made his startling statements. And one fact must be emphasized. Had it not been for the streak of morbidity that ran through his whole family-as witness James-or possibly for Dean's fits of hard drinking during the years he was in Canada, he would never have reached a dangerous state of nerves. You saw him at the dub, wiry and vital in his movements, with his sandy mustache, his young-old face and reddish hair, his heavy forehead above sardonic eyes. Yet you invariably felt there was a shadow there-some snag out of the past. Once, in one of those casual shifting discussions, somebody was haranguing us about the newest scientific terms for madness; and Halliday said suddenly, blasting the talk with the personal, "You never know, do you? My brother James, now-" Then he laughed.

I had known him for some time before we became at all friendly. We used to fall into casual conversation in the smoking-room at the club. What I knew of Halliday -for we never talked of personal matters-was fired at me by my sister, who happened to be well acquainted with Lady Benning, Halliday's aunt.

He was, it appeared, the younger son of a tea-importer who had got so rich that he could refuse a title, and say that his firm was too old for that sort of thing. The old man, Dean's father, had side-whiskers and a turkeycock nose. He was sour enough to his associates, but fairly indulgent toward his sons. The real head of the family, however, was Lady Benning, his sister.

Dean went through a number of phases. Before the war, as an undergraduate, he was one-of the customary down from-Cambridge bloods. Then the war came along. Like a number of others, the drawler suddenly became an amazingly good soldier. He left the army with a D.S.O. and a lot of shrapnel inside, and then started raising hell in earnest. There was trouble; a dubious nymph sued for breach of promise; family portraits wriggled with horror; and, with that happy British optimism which decides that bad ways always change if they are practiced somewhere else, Dean was packed off to Canada.

Meantime, his brother had inherited Halliday and Son at the death of the old man. Brother James was Lady Benning's favorite and darling; James was this, James was that, James was a model of soft-spoken rectitude and precision.... The truth of the matter lay in the fact that James was a decayed little prig. He used to go on ostensible business-trips and lie speechlessly fuddled in bawdy houses for two-week periods, then slip back quietly to Lancaster Gate, with his hair brushed straight again, complaining resignedly of his health. I knew him slightly-a smiling man always in a mild sweat, who couldn't sit still in a chair. All this mightn't have hurt him, if it hadn't been for what he called his conscience. His conscience got him, presently. He went home one night and shot himself.

Lady Benning was distracted. She had never liked Dean - I think it probable that, in some obscure way, she held him responsible for James's death-but now it was necessary to recall him as head of the family from his nine year exile.

He had sobered down, but he still had enough of the old humorous devil to make him good (sometimes dangerous) company. He had seen men and places. He had acquired a tolerant droop of the eyelid. Also, there was about him a certain fresh vitality and frankness which must have disturbed the somnolent air round Lancaster Gate. You liked his grin. He was very fond of beer, detective stories, and poker. Anyhow, things seemed to be going well for the returned prodigal; but I think he was lonely.

Then something happened. It was more than unexpected, because I had heard from my sister, a short time before, that he was "understood" to be engaged to be married. After mentioning the girl's name as Marion Latimer, my sister had enlivened the afternoon with a rapid and Tarzan-like inspection of her family tree. When the branches were all tested, my sister had smiled grimly over her folded hands, looked in a sinister fashion at the canary, and said she hoped it would turn out all right.

But something had happened. Halliday was one of those people who carry their own atmospheres about with them. We felt it at the club, though he spoke to us as usual. Nobody said anything; Halliday would glance at us sharply, and try to be the jolly good fellow; and afterwards he would look confused. There was something wrong with his laugh. He used it too often, and spilled cards on the table when he shuffled sometimes, because he had not been looking at them. This went on for a week or two, not very pleasantly. Then, after a time, he stopped coming altogether.

One night I was sitting in the smoking-room after dinner. I had just ordered coffee, and I was in one of those thick sloughs of boredom where every face looks vapid; where you wonder why the whole rushing, solemn routine of a city doesn't get sick of its own nonsense and stop. It was a wet night, and the big, brown-leather smoking. room was deserted. I was sitting idly near the fire making nothing of a newspaper, when Dean Halliday walked in.

I sat up a little-there was something in the way he walked. He hesitated, looked around, and stopped again. He said, "Hullo, Blake," and sat down some distance away.

The silence was doubly uncomfortable. What he thought was in the air, was all about, was as palpable as the fire at which he was staring. He wanted to ask me something, and couldn't. I noticed that his shoes and the edges of his trousers were muddy, as though he had been walking far; he seemed unconscious of the damp-extinguished cigarette between his fingers. There was no humor now in the low chin, the high forehead, the high-muscled jaws.

I crackled my newspaper. Remembering it afterwards, I think it was then my eye caught a small headline towards the foot of the first page: "STRANGE THEFT AT-" but I did not read it at the time, or notice any more.

Halliday inflated his chest. Quite suddenly he looked up.

"Look here, Blake," he said in a sort of rush. "I regard you as a pretty level-headed fellow...."

"Why don't you tell me about it?" I suggested.

"Ah," he said, and sat back in his chair; and looked at me steadily. "If you won't think I'm a jabbering ass. Or an old woman. Or-" As I shook my head he interposed: "Wait, Blake. Wait a bit. Before I tell you about it, let me ask you whether you're willing to give me a hand in what you'll probably call an idiotic business. I want you to..."

"Go on”

"To spend the night in a haunted house," said Halliday.

"What's idiotic about that?" I asked, trying to conceal the fact that my boredom had begun to disappear; I felt an anticipatory pleasure, and my- companion seemed to notice it.

He laughed a little, now. "Right. I say, this is better than I'd hoped for! I didn't want you to think I was crazy, that's all. You see, I'm not interested in the blasted business; or I wasn't. They may return, or they may not. I don't know. All I do know is that, if matters keep on in the present way, then-I'm not exaggerating-two lives are going to be ruined."

He was very quiet now, staring at the fire, speaking in an absent voice.

"Six months ago, you see, the whole thing would have seemed wildly absurd. I knew Aunt Anne was going to a medium-or mediums. I knew she had persuaded Marion to go along with her. Well, damn it-I couldn't see any harm in that." He shifted. "I suppose I thought of it, if I thought about it at all, as a fad like bagatelle or jigsaw puzzles. I certainly supposed that Marion at least would keep her sense of humor... " He looked up. "I'm forgetting something. Tell me, Blake. Do you believe?"

I said I would always be prepared to accept satisfactory evidence, but that I had never come on it as yet.

"I wonder," he mused. “`Satisfactory evidence'. Ha. What the devil is it, anyhow?" His short brown hair had tumbled partly across his forehead; his eyes were full of a hot, baffled anger; and muscles tightened down, his jaws. "I think the man's a charlatan. Well and good. But I went myself to a God-forsaken house-alone-nobody else there-nobody knew I was going....

"Listen, Blake. I could tell you the whole story, if you insist on knowing. I don't want you to walk in blindfold. But I'd rather you didn't ask anything. I want you to go with me, tonight, to a certain house in London; to tell me whether you see or hear anything; and, if you do, whether you can explain it on natural grounds. There'll be no difficulty about getting into the house. It belongs to our family, as a matter of fact.... Will you go?"

"Yes. You expect a trick, then?"

Halliday shook his head. "I don't know. But I can't tell you how grateful I'd be. I don't suppose you've had any experience in these matters? Old empty house-things.... Good God, if I only knew more people! If we could get somebody to go with us who knew all about fake.... What are you laughing at?"

"You need a good stiff drink. I wasn't laughing. I was only thinking that I knew our man, provided you don't object "

"Object?"

"To a Detective-Inspector from Scotland Yard."

Halliday stiffened. "Don't talk rot. Above everything else, I don't want the police in on this. Forget it, I tell you! Marion would never forgive me.

"Oh, not in an official capacity, you understand. Masters makes rather a hobby of this." I smiled again, thinking of Masters the unruffled, Masters the ghost-breaker; the big, stout, urbane man who was as pleasant as a cardsharper and as cynical as Houdini. During the spiritualistic craze that took England after the war, he was a detective-sergeant whose chief business was the exposing of bogus mediums. Since then his interest had increased (apologetically) into a hobby In the workshop of his little house at Hampstead, surrounded by his approving children, he tinkered with ingenious devices of parlor magic; and was altogether highly pleased with himself.