John Carr - The Plague Court Murders

"Never mind.... Point's this. Ted Latimer fanatically believed in the earthbound soul Darworth was goin' to exorcise. He'd got himself into a state of ecstasy and exaltation. He believed this house was swarmin' with deadly influences. He wanted to go out among 'em-face 'em - see 'em! He had been forbidden to move, and yet, d'ye see, he felt that he had to go out of the `safe' room into their midst.... And, my lads, when Ted Latimer got up and crept out of that circle, he was carrying the traditional weapon against evil spirits: a crucifix."

Major Featherton asked hoarsely:

"You're saying he was the confederate? He was the one who went out?"

"Man, doesn't that crucifix sound like it? He went out, yes. But he was the one you heard go out."

"Two-" said Halliday blankly. "Then why didn't he tell us he'd gone out?"

H.M. leaned over and picked up his watch. Something was on the way; some force gathering round with the quick ticking....

"Because something happened," said H.M. quietly. "Because he saw or heard or noticed something that made even him suspect Darworth wasn't murdered by ghosts... Can you account for his wild behavior afterwards in any other way, son? He was done up. He screamed belief at you. How did Lady Benning feel when Masters ripped out all those wires in Darworth's seance room, and tore the bowels out of her beloved phantom James? Ted still believed in Darworth; and yet he didn't. In any case - whatever it was, dye see? - he still thought the Truth was bigger than Darworth; better to have everybody believe Darworth was really killed by spooks, if the trickery in this case went to support the Truth in the eyes of the world! . . . Didn't somebody tell me how he kept repeating, over and over, that this would bring the truth before the world, and what was one man's mere life compared to that? Didn't he keep hysterically insisting on that? By God, I thought so!"

"Then what was it," said Halliday, choking suddenly, "what was it Ted saw or heard or noticed?"

H.M. slowly got to his feet, immense in the firelit room.

"D'you want me to show you?" he asked. "It's nearly time."

The heat of the fire was suffocating, rather hypnotic. The mist of incense, the distortion of fire and candlelight, made the expression on the dummy's mask one of satirical enjoyment; as though, behind the embodiment of canvas and sand, Roger Darworth were listening to us in the haunted place where he had died.

"Ken," said H.M., "take Louis Playge's dagger off the table. Got a handkerchief? Good. You remember, there was a handkerchief found under Darworth's body.... Now take that knife and give the dummy three hard, scratching cuts: use your strength and rip the clothes: on his left arm, hip, and leg. Go on!"

The thing must have weighed fourteen stone. It did not move when I did as I was told, except a hideously lifelike jerk against the table. The face slid a little sideways under the rakish hat, as though the dummy had glanced down. Sand sprayed and spilled out across my hand.

"Now cut his clothes a little, but don't puncture the canvas, that's it – anywhere - half a dozen good ones. Now! Now you've done what Darworth himself did. So wipe your fingerprints off the handle with that handkerchief and drop the handkerchief on the floor... ''

Halliday said very quietly:

"There's somebody walking round outside this house."

"Dagger back on the table, Ken. Now, then, I want all of you to watch the fire. Don't look at me; keep your eyes straight ahead, because the murderer's nearly here...”

"There's no blood to distract you now. Only a little sand. If you only knew it, all the ingenuity of this crime lies in Louis Playge's dagger being exactly that kind of dagger; in preparing your mind for it, as Darworth did; and in the splendid window-dressing of cat's blood and slashed clothes. And a very hot fire, and heavy incense in it, so that you couldn't smell. . . . Keep looking at the fire, now; don't look at me or at each other or at the dummy; watch the fire and how it blazes ... and in just a second you'll solve this thing for yourself...''

From somewhere in the room, or near it, there was a creaking and what sounded like a dull scrape. Always I was conscious of the dummy, so close to me that I could touch it, as though I were standing beside a guillotine. The fire crackled and pulsed; most of all, you heard the steady, sharp ticking of H.M.'s watch. The creaking grew louder...”

"My God, I can't stand this!" said Major Featherton - hoarsely. I shot a side glance at him; his eyeballs were starting and his face mottled as though it had begun to color in a fit. "I tell you I -"

Then it happened.

H.M.'s hands slapped together sharply; how many times I could not tell. In the same moment the dummy rose forward in its chair, upsetting the candle on the table. It hesitated, wavered, and thudded forward on its face - a canvas sack outflung, with the rakish black hat almost in the fire. There was a clang and clatter as Louis Playge's dagger struck the floor just beside it.

"What in God's name-!" shouted Halliday. He was on his feet, peering wildly about the firelit room, and so were all the rest of us.

None of us had moved, none of us had touched the dummy; and yet, but for ourselves, the room was empty.

My knees were shaking as I sat down again. I drew a sleeve across my eyes, and yanked one foot back; for the dummy was resting against it, and the floor was gritty with spurted sand from its back. There were wounds in the dummy's back: one that had nipped across the shoulder-blade, one high up on the shoulder, one beside the spine, and one under the left shoulder-blade that would have pierced the canvas heart.

"Steady, son!" said H.M.'s slow, calming, easy voice. He gripped Halliday by the shoulder. "Look for yourself, now, and you'll see. There's no blood and no hocus-pocus. Examine that dummy as though you didn't know anything about what Darworth intended to do; as though you'd never heard of Louis Playge or his dagger; as though no suggestion had been forced on you as to what was to happen.... '

Halliday came forward shakily and bent down.

"Well?" he demanded.

"Look, for instance," said H.M., "at the hole that finished him; the one straight through the heart. Pick up Louis Playge's dagger, and fit it into that hole.... Fits, don't it? Quite, quite. Why does it fit?"

"Why does it-?" said Halliday wildly.

"Because the hole's round, son; the hole's round. And the dagger is just the same size. . . . But if you'd never seen any dagger, and never had any suggestion of a dagger forced on you, what would you say it looked like? Answer, somebody! Ken?"

"It looks," I said, "like a bullet-hole."

"But, my God, the man wasn't shot!" cried Halliday. "There'd have been bullets found in the wounds. And there weren't any found by the police surgeon."

"It was a very special sort of bullet, my dear fathead," said H.M. softly. "It was made, in fact, of rock-salt.... They dissolve, my fathead, between four and six minutes at blood-heat; it takes longer than that for a dead body to cool. And, when a dead body is lying in front of one of the hottest fires in England with its back exposed.... Son, it's nothing new. The French police have used 'em for some time; they're antiseptic, and no dangerous extractions of the bullet necessary when used on a burglar; it dissolves. But if it pierces the heart, the man's just as dead as though it had been lead."

He turned, and heaved" up an arm to point.

"Was Louis Playge's dagger originally exactly the same circumference as a bullet from a thirty-eight caliber revolver? Eh? Burn me, I dunno. But Darworth ground it down to the same size: not a millimeter difference. Darworth constructed his own rock-salt bullet, fatheads, on his own lathe. He got his material from one of those pieces of rock-salt 'sculpture' that Ted very, very innocently mentioned to Masters and Ken. He left traces of the salt on the lathe. It might have been fired, there bein' no noise, either from an air-pistol-which is the method I should have chosen myself-or from an ordinary pistol with a silencer. When thick incense, is burned in a small room, notwithstandin', I conclude that it was an ordinary pistol with powder-smoke that might be smelled.... Finally, it could have been fired through a big keyhole; but, as a matter of fact, the muzzle of a .38 exactly fits one of the nice grating-spaces of any of the four windows round this room. The windows, somebody may have told you, are up against the roof. If - I say if - somebody could get on that roof...."

From outside, in the yard, there was a shout, and then a scream. Masters' voice yelled, "Look out!" and two heavy shots exploded just as H.M. pushed aside the table and heaved himself towards the door.

"That was Darworth's scheme," snarled H.M. "But the little joker firin' them shots now is the murderer. Get that

door open, Ken. I'm afraid the murderer's loose.... I wrenched the bolt back, pushed up the bar, and

dragged the door open. The yard was a nightmare of darting lights. Something ducked past us, a low shape in the moonlight, started to run for our door, and then whirled as we stumbled out. There was a needle-spit flash, and a flat bang almost in our faces. Through a wake of powder smoke, we could see Masters-a bull's-eye lantern in his hand-charging after that running figure which zigzagged about the yard. H.M.'s bellow rose above the din of shouts:

"You goddamned fool, didn't you search----?'

"Didn't say anything," Masters yelled back chokingly, "about being under arrest.... You said not to.... Head off, boys! Close in! Can't-get-out of the yard now.... Penned in...."

Other shapes, flickering long flashlight beams, darted round the side of the house....

"Got the devil!" somebody shouted out of the dark. "Penned in a corner-“

"No," said a clear thin voice out of the dark; "no, you haven't."

I will swear to this day that I saw the revolver flash lighting up a face, a mouth split in triumphant defiance, as that woman fired a last bullet into her own forehead. Something went down in a sodden heap, over against the wall near Louis Playge's crooked tree. . . . Then there was a great silence in the yard, smoke white against the moon, and dragging footsteps as men closed in.

"Let's have your lamp," H.M. said in a heavy voice to Masters. "Gentlemen," he said with a sort of bitter flourish, "go over and take a look at the most brilliant she-devil who ever gave an old veteran the nightmare. Take the lamp, Halliday - don't be afraid, man!"

The bright light shook in his hand. It caught a white face turned sideways in the mud by the wall, the mouth open still sardonically....

Halliday started, and peered. "But - but who is it?" he demanded. "I'll swear I never saw that woman before. She's"

"Oh, yes you have, son," said H.M.

I remembered a picture in a newspaper; a fleeting one, cloudy and uncertain, and I hardly heard myself saying:

"That's ... that's Glenda Darworth, H.M. That's his second wife. But you said - Halliday's right - we never

saw.... "Oh, yes, you did," repeated H.M. Then his big voice raised: "But you never recognized her all the time she was masquerading as `Joseph', did you?"

XX

THE MURDERER

“WHAT annoys me most," growled H.M., who was heating water on a forbidden gas-ring in the lavatory connecting with his office, "what annoys me most is that I should've spotted this whole business a day earlier-naturally, fatheads - if I'd only known everything that you knew. It wasn't until last night and this morning (or yesterday morning) that I got a chance to go over everything with Masters; and then I could 'a' kicked myself. Humph. Comes o' tryin' to be godlike."