The Plague Court Murders

"-they must know something about him in Edinburgh," the girl was saying to McDonnell, almost pleadingly. "Or else why should they send this telegram?"

I had realized before that she was beautiful, even at that dark hour in the squalor of Plague Court: but not to the dazzling extent she showed against the background of Darworth's crookedly brilliant hall. She was dressed in some sort of shimmering black effect, with a black hat and a large white-fur collar. It might have been animation, it might have been only more make-up; yet, despite the pale face, her eyes had a softness and appeal as though the woman had found herself again after some blighting influence. She greeted us quickly and warmly.

"I couldn't resist coming over here," she said. "Mr. McDonnell left word he was on his way, and said he wanted to see me. And I wanted all of you to see this. It's from my mother. She's in Edinburgh now ... staying there....

We read the telegram, which said:

"MY BOY IS NOT HERE BUT THEY SHAN'T HAVE HIM."

"Ah," said Masters. "From your mother, miss? Any idea what it means?"

"No. That's what I wanted to ask you. That is, unless he's gone up to her." She gestured. "But why should he?"

"Excuse me, miss. Has Mr. Latimer the habit," asked Masters with blunt contemptuousness, "of running off to his mother when he's got into trouble?"

She looked at him. "Do you think that's altogether fair?"

"I'm only thinking, miss, that this is a murder case. I'm afraid I've got to ask for your mother's address. The police will have to look into this. As for the telegram - well, we'll see what Sir Henry makes of it?"

"Sir Henry?"

"Merrivale. Gentleman who's handling this. He's using the telephone now; if you'll sit down a minute. . . ."

The door of the telephone-closet creaked, letting out a wave of smoke and H.M. with the old pipe fuming between his teeth. He looked sour and dangerous; he had started to speak before he saw Marion; then his whole expression changed instantly to a sluggish benevolence. He took the pipe out of his mouth, and inspected her in frank admiration.

"You're a nice-lookin' nymph," he announced. "Burn me, but you are!" (This, as heaven is my witness, is H.M.'s idea of a polite social compliment, which has frequently caused consternation). "I saw a girl in a film the other day, looked just like you. About the middle of the picture she took off her clothes. Maybe you saw it? Hey? I forget the name of the picture, but it seems this girl couldn't make up her mind whether to-"

Masters emitted a loud, honking noise. He said: "This is Miss Latimer, sir-“

"Well, I still think she's a dashed nice-lookin' nymph," returned H.M., as though defending a point. "I've heard a lot about you, my dear. I wanted to see you and tell you that we mean to clear up this mess, and get your brother back for you without any fuss.... Now, my dear, was there anything you wanted to see me about?"

For a moment she looked at him. But such had been H.M.'s obvious sincerity that it was hardly possible to rap out whatever may be the modern equivalent for "Sir!" Suddenly she beamed at him.

"I think," she said, "that you're a nasty old man."

"I am," H.M. agreed composedly. "Only I'm frank about it, d'ye see? Humph. Now, now, what's this-?" Masters had thrust the telegram into his hands, to shut off further discourse. "Telegram. 'My boy is brr-rr brrr-" he mumbled through it, and then grunted. "To you, hey? When did you get it?"

"Not half an hour ago. It was waiting for me when I got home. Please, can't you tell me anything? I hurried over here. . .

"Now, now. Don't get excited. Dashed good of you to let us have this. But I'll tell you how it is, my dear." He became confidential. "I want to have a long talk with you and young Halliday-"

"

"He's outside in the car now," she told him almost eagerly. "He brought me over."

"Yes, yes. But not now, you see. But we got lots of work to do; find the man with the scar, and so on.... So look here. Why don't you and Halliday arrange to be at my office tomorrow morning; say, about eleven o'clock? Inspector Masters will call for you, and show you where it is, and everything?" He was very easy and pleasant, but there was a slow dexterity about the way in which he maneuvered her towards the door.

"I'll be there! Oh, I'll be there. And so will Dean. . . She bit her lips. Her appealing glance took us all in before the door closed.

For a time H.M. remained staring at that door. We heard the sound of a motor starting in the street. Then H.M. slowly turned round.

"If that girl," he said with a meditative scowl, "if that girl hasn't tumbled off the apple-tree years before this, then somebody's been damned unenterprising. Nature abhors a vacuum. What a waste. Humph. Now, I wonder. .. ." He scratched his chin.

"You shoved her out of here quick enough," said Masters. "Look here, sir, what's up? Did you find out anything from that specialist?"

H.M. looked at him. There was something in his expression....

"I wasn't talking to Horseface," he said, in a voice that seemed to echo in the bleak hall. "Not just then."

There was a silence, and still the words echoed with ugly suggestion. Masters clenched his fists.

"It was at the end of that," continued H.M. in that heavy, unemotional voice. "It was a relay call through from the Yard....Masters, why didn't you tell me somebody called on Joseph at five o'clock this afternoon?"

"You don't mean-?"

H.M. nodded. He stumped over and flopped his vast weight into the black chair. "I'm not blamin' you.... I wouldn't have known.... Yes, you've guessed it. Joseph has been murdered. With Louis Playge's dagger."

XVII

CHOCOLATES AND CHLOROFORM

WITH the second murder by the person they described in their stereotyped fashion as the "phantom killer" - words which do not in the least convey the horror, or give a proper impression of the circumstances - with the second murder, the Plague Court case had not even yet taken its last and most terrible turn. Remembering the night of the 8th of September, of our sitting in the stone house staring at the dummy on the chair, I can realize that other things were only a prelude. All events seemed to return to Louis Playge. If Louis Playge still watched, he would have seen his own fate reenacted in the solution of the case.

But the second murder was ghoulish enough, especially in the actions of the murderer. As soon as the news came through, H.M., Masters and I piled into the latter's car and drove out that long distance to Brixton. H.M., spread out in the tonneau with the dead pipe between his teeth, snapped out the brief facts that had been given him.

Sergeant Thomas Banks, detailed by Masters to find out what he could about Joseph and the Mrs. Sweeney who owned the house, had spent the day in discreet inquiries about the neighborhood. There was nobody at home that day; Mrs. Sweeney had gone out visiting for the day, and Joseph to the motion pictures. An affable greengrocer, who supplied the little that was known about the house and its occupants, said this was Mrs. Sweeney's weekly day for visits, "in a Queen Mary hat and a coat with black feathers all over it." All he knew of Mrs. Sweeney was that she was suspected of having once been a medium herself; was very genteel; didn't mix with anybody; and discouraged conversation with neighbors. Since she had brought Joseph to live there about four years ago, the house had rather, a haunted reputation. People shunned it. Sometimes its occupants were away for long periods, and occasionally "a fine motor-car 'ud come up, with a bunch of toffs in it."

At ten minutes past five that afternoon, Sergeant Banks had seen a taxicab drive up through the mist and drizzle. One of the occupants had been Joseph; the other only a hand that was urging him towards the gate in the brick wall. round the house. Phoning this news to Masters, Banks had received instructions to get inside and have a look round, if it didn't strain his conscience. After the two had been inside some little time, Banks crossed the road and found the gate open. Inside everything seemed in order: a squat, two-storied house, a bedraggled lawn and strip of back-garden. A light was burning in a ground-floor room at the side; but the curtains were drawn, and he could neither see nor hear anything. At length Sergeant Banks, a somewhat unenterprising man, had decided to call it a day.

A public-house called the King William IV, some little way down from the house, at the, corner of Loughborough Road and Hather Street, had opened its doors by this time.

"Banks left the pub," said H.M., chewing at his pipe, "about a quarter past six. It was fortunate he'd stopped for that drink. To get his bus, he had to walk back past that house- it's called, burn me, `Magnolia Cottage.' When he was about a hundred yards away he saw a man tear open the gate in the wall, come out a-yellin', and rush up Loughborough Road. ahead of him. . ."

Masters kept the siren roaring on the blue car; this time we were flying back along the way we had come. He shouted, "Not-?"

"No! Wait, dammit! Banks chased the fellow and finally caught him. It turned out to be a workman, a sort of general odd-job man in overalls; scared green, and running for a policeman. When he got to talkin' coherently he kept talkin' murder, murder; and wouldn't believe Banks was a police officer until a constable came along and they all went back to Magnolia Cottage.

"It seems he'd got instructions from Mrs. Sweeney to bring a carload of dirt and mortar and make some kind of repairs to the back-garden. Well, he was late from his last job that day; so he thought he'd only dump the stuff in the yard and come back next day to do his work. So he comes in through the back gate, pretty nervous about the house, and thinks he'll go round the front way and tell Mrs. Sweeney it's too dark to go on with the job until tomorrow. And, on the way, he sees a light in the cellar window... "

They had given us a clear right of way through the West End. Masters was hurling the Vauxhall with dangerous swings and skids on the wet turnings. We shot down Whitehall, skidded left at the Clock' Tower, and out across Westminster Bridge.

"He saw Joseph lying on the cellar floor, still squirmin' around in a lot of blood, and trying to wriggle his hands. He was on his face, and the handle of the dagger was stickin' out of his back. He died while this fellow outside was watchin'....

"But that wasn't what scaredhim. so

much, it appeared, as the other thing. There was somebody else in the cellar."

I had turned round from the front seat, and was trying to decipher the strange, almost wild expression on H.M.'s . face as the lamps of the bridge flickered past it.

"Oh, no," he said satirically; "I know what you're thinkin'.... Just shoes. Just shoes again, but a worse kind. He didn't get a look at the other person. The other, person was stokin' the furnace.

"That's what I said. Banks says it's a big furnace for hot air pipes in the middle of the cellar. This workman was on the other side from the furnace door when he looked through the window, so he couldn't see who our little playmate was. Besides, there was only a candle burnin'. But there was a crack in the glass at the window, and the workman could hear the shovel bump on the furnace door, and then coal being scraped up, and the shovel bump again. ... That was when he bolted.... He must have given a yell, because he just saw somebody start to come round the side of the furnace.

"Shut up, now. Don't ask questions yet. Banks says that when he and the constable and this workman got back to Magnolia Cottage, and smashed a window to get in, there was still one of Joseph's feet stickin' out of the furnace door. But there was such a blaze inside that they had to get buckets of water before they. could drag him out. Banks swears he was alive when he was put in, but he'd been soaked in kerosene, so ..."

The lamps over the dark water faded as we slid into the shadows of the Lambeth side; and it grew even darker when we had penetrated out into the somber streets beyond Kensington Road. It may be a pleasant or even cheerful region by day; I do not know. But those miles of black thoroughfares, too broad and too infrequently lit with gas-lights; those ramparts of squat, double houses showing furtive gleams behind doors checkered in red-and-white glass; all this is enlivened sometimes by the glare of a cinema or pub, or those desolate squares full of small shops, through which trams scrape wearily and everybody in sight seems to be riding bicycles.

Nowadays the sound of a bicycle-bell is associated in my mind with that small house - like all its neighbors, with solid gable and red-and-white glass door, except that it was detached in its own grounds - before which our car presently drew up. The pallor of a street-lamp, blurred with mist, showed us the crowd that had gathered before the wall round Magnolia Cottage. It was a tractable crowd. Its members said nothing and did nothing; they shifted and stared thoughtfully at the pavement, as though they were philosophizing about death. Some bicycle-bells rang insistently beyond them; otherwise the broad dark road was quiet. Frequently a policeman would tower through the crowd, saying, "Now, then; now, then!" with absentminded briskness; the crowd would shift round slightly, and stay the same.

Sighting our car, the policeman made a lane for us. Somebody whispered, "'Oo's the old josser?" In ceremonial quiet the policeman opened an iron gate; we went up a brick path, followed by more whisperings. A stout, nervous-looking young man with a ruddy face - obviously not used to plain clothes - opened the front door and saluted Masters.

"Right, Banks," said the Inspector curtly. "Anything new since you rang up?"

"The old lady's come back, sir," replied Banks. He wiped his forehead rather doubtfully. "Mrs. Sweeney. Bit of a handful. I've got her in the parlor.... That corpse's still in the cellar, sir; we had to take it out of the furnace. And the knife's still in its back, though the rest is a mess. It's that - that Plague Court knife right enough."

He led us into a dismal hallway, which smelt strongly of yesterday's cooked mutton. Another smell had got into it, too; but I will not suggest an analogy. A tipsy gas-mantle burned on a bracket near the staircase; there was cracked oil-cloth on the floor and the flowered-paper walls had a tendency to sweat. I noticed several closed doors, before which hung bead curtains. Masters asked for the man who had discovered the body; and became sarcastic when informed that the man had been allowed to go home for a time.

"His 'ands were burned bad, sir," Banks replied, rather stiffly. "He did a man's job, and that's a fact. I got one or two burns meself. And he's straight. I’ve got it from everybody: they all know him. 'E lives just round the next turning; lived there all his life."

Masters grunted. "Right. Find out anything new?"

"Not much time, sir. If you'd like to look at that corp--?"

The Inspector glanced at H.M., who was glumly peering round the hall.

"Me? Oh, no. You go look at it Masters. I got other business. I'm goin' out and talk to that bunch of people on the pavement. Why do you police fellers always want to chase crowds away? They come right up to you, better than if you'd rounded up the whole neighborhood on purpose-which you couldn't do if you wanted-and yet you don't use 'em. Then I'm goin' to look in the yard. See you later."

He sniffed absently, and tottered out. A moment later we heard him saying, "Howdy, boys?" to the obvious stupefaction of the crowd.

Banks took us first to a little dining-room, where everything had that sickly and fish-glazed look of the stuffed trout in a case over the mantelpiece. A decanter of port had been set out on the blotched table-cloth, but only one glass had been used. Opposite it - obviously where Joseph had sat - was a five-pound box of chocolates from which the whole top layer had been greedily eaten. It was that which intensified the evil of the business: Joseph greedily eating chocolates probably brought him by somebody; and across from him, X sipping port and watching.... Masters sniffed the air.

"This the room where you saw the light first, Banks?" he asked. "Right. There's something I can smell"

"Chloroform, sir. We found the sponge downstairs" Again Banks nervously wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "Whoever it was got behind him, slipped the sponge on; then dragged him downstairs and killed him easy. No blood up here.... I don't think we were expected to find the body, sir. I think whoever it was intended for him just to disappear, shoved in the furnace and gone. But John Watkins happened to see it, and - and whoever it was just cut and ran."

"Maybe. Downstairs now."

We did not linger in the basement. In fact, I came up after one look. The place was splashed with water from their attempts to put out the fire; the furnace still sizzled, winking with angry red gleams, and harsh smoke hung in sheets along the floor. One candle was burning on a box: lying near it was something which at first glance looked as though it had rotted and blackened, now crumbling to pieces with little curls of sparks winking along it. You could not make out much except the legs, whose shoes were only badly scorched; but you could see the handle of the dagger in the back. One fragment of Joseph's gayly checkered clothes hung singeing still on the open furnace door. It was not alone the odor, acrid smoke or human; the sight itself turned my stomach, and I had to get back up to the comparative cleanness of the mutton-greasy air in the hall.

As I did so, one of the doors moved quickly shut again, as though someone had been peering out; and that set the last touch on it. Banks had said Mrs. Sweeney was in one of the rooms; but always the slyness! Always the voice, the soft footfall, the glutinous something just round the corner, never seen until it leaped and struck! What, for instance, had Joseph thought (munching his chocolates under the singing gas-light, in a prosaic dining-room) when somebody smiling at him from the other side of the table had got up, strolled round him, and-?

Masters' footfalls clumped up the stairs. Banks was repeating his story; but there seemed to be nothing new. The Inspector made a few notes, after which we went in to see Mrs. Sweeney.

Mrs. Sweeney was a large woman, with a heavy face which seemed to come sailing at us as she got up from her seat by the small round table in this waxy best-parlor. She was not ill-featured; she resembled one of those old ladies who sit and knit in boarding-houses, but larger, harder, and more archly cunning. Her grayish hair was folded into buns over her ears. She wore the black coat "with black feathers"; and a rimless pince-nez attached by a gold chain. This last she twitched off with a gesture which tried to indicate that she had been improving her time by studying the Bible, on the center-table.

"So!" said Mrs. Sweeney. Her dark eyebrows went up. She lifted the pince-nez slightly to one side of her eyes, as though she had been removing a mask, and rasped accusingly: "I suppose you know, my friend, the horror and the awfulness of what has been done in this house?"

"Yes, we know it," replied Masters, wearily, in the tone of one who says, "Chuck it!" He got out his notebook. "Your name, please."

"Melantha Sweeney."

"Occupation?"

"I am an independent widow." She gave a shake of her ample bust, rather as though she were dislodging worldly cares; but it was a gesture curiously like that performed by the chorus in a musical comedy.

"Just so. Any relation to the deceased, Joseph Dennis?"

"No. That is what I wished to explain. I was very fond of poor Joseph, though he resisted all my attempts to know him better. I have been fond of him ever since Mr. Darworth, the gentleman who was the victim of that brutal assault last night, brought him to me and provided a home for him. The boy had genuine - truly genuine - psychic talents," said Mrs. Sweeney, knocking her knuckles on the Bible.

"How long have you lived here?"

"Over four years."

"How long has Joseph Dennis lived here?"

"I believe-I believe it will be three years this quarter-day.... I am very worldly-minded, you see." She was trying to strike a note of lightness, for a reason I could not understand. Then she turned a little sideways, and the gaslight showed sweat on her forehead; it brought out suddenly the fact that this woman was nearly frightened out of her wits. We heard her breathing.

"How well did you know Mr. Darworth?"

"Not at all well! I - I used to be interested in psychical research; that was how I met him. But I gave it up. It was much too fatiguing."

These, I could tell, were merely quick routine questions; Masters was not attacking. The real test would come after all evidence had been straightened. He went on:

"Do you know anything about Joseph Dennis? His parents, say?"

"I know absolutely nothing" She added, with a curious inflection: "You would have to ask Mr. Darworth about his parents."

"Come, come!"

"That is all I can tell you. He was a foundling, who had been starved and ill-treated in childhood, I believe."

"Did you have any reason to suspect that he was in danger?"

"No! He - he was upset when he returned last night; naturally. But he had forgotten about it this morning. I gathered they did not tell him Mr. Darworth was dead, and he was eager to go to the cinema this afternoon.... I-I suppose he did. I myself left the house at eleven o'clock this morning. . . ."

Mrs. Sweeney faltered. She grasped the edges of the Bible, and began to speak earnestly, partly incoherently. "Listen to me. Please listen. You want to know what I know about this ghastly business this afternoon. And I tell you I can account for every minute I've spent today, after I left here this morning. I went round to see John Watkins, the odd-job man; there is a filled-in well in the back garden that has been cracking its cement and flooding out, and I wanted it repaired. Afterwards I went straight to the home of some friends of mine in Clapham, and stayed there all day. . . ."

She looked from Masters to me, and then at Banks. Yet, despite all this, the woman's main motive was not fear lest she would be suspected; this did not worry her nearly so much as something else. And there was also something about her that did not quite ring true. An overdone gesture, a trick of speech; what was it?

"What time did you return?"

"I took a bus from Clapham - it must have been shortly after six o'clock. You know what I found. Your-your man will tell you when I arrived." She backed away, and sat down in a horsehair chair behind the table. Taking out a small handkerchief, she dabbed at her face as though she were putting on powder. "Inspector - you are an inspector, aren't you?" she corrected herself hastily. "Yes. There's one other thing. In heaven's name, you won't force me to stay the night here, will you? I beg you, I pray . . .!" Even to her this seemed to sound a trifle flowery. She went on in an even but a very vehement tone: "You may investigate these friends of mine. They are good, respectable people. Won't you allow me to spend the night with them?"

"Well, well ... why do you want to do that?" Mrs. Sweeney looked straight at him. "I'm afraid," she said.

Masters shut up his notebook. He said to Banks, "See if you can find Sir Henry: the man who came with us. I want him to speak to this witness. . . . Wait! Have you searched the house, upstairs and all about?"

This question was directed at Mrs. Sweeney; I saw her give a slight movement, which she disguised by industrious work with the handkerchief.

"Been a lot of ransacking upstairs, sir. I don't know. The lady here'll have to tell if anything's missing."

I went with Banks out into the hall. Some instinct had begun to warn all of us that this house, and Mrs. Sweeney, might be of more significance in the case than anybody had suspected. There was something wrong about Mrs. Sweeney which did not rest alone in mere lies. She was acting; and, either in fear or guilt or only in nervousness, was overplaying the part. I wanted to see H.M. in action with this witness.

He was not at the gate outside, and the crowd had thinned. But the policeman on duty, who was imbued with a Jovian amusement, informed us. H.M. was over at the King William, standing drinks to half the population. Banks went back to tell Masters, whom I could hear cursing in the doorway, while I went out in search of him. I believe the good Inspector was also shaking his fist.

The King William IV, a snug public-house exhaling a mist of tobacco-smoke through its lighted doors, was crowded. The chairs along the walls were occupied by the usual red-faced gentlemen with brass-collar-studs, who sit in a line like figures in a shooting-gallery and chuckle at everything. H.M., with a pint tankard in his hand and an admiring crowd about him, was throwing darts at a scarred board. In the intervals he was saying, "Gentlemen, we must not, we will not, as free British subjects, submit to the indignities perpetrated by the present Government in grindin' the faces of the working-" I stuck my head through the doorway of, the bar-parlor and whistled. He stopped, disposed of the pint of bitter with a shark-like gulp, shook hands with everybody, and lumbered out pursued by cheers.

In the misty street outside his expression changed. He turned up the collar of his coat; and, if I had not known him so well, I could have sworn the man was nervous.

I said: "The old tricks are still successful. Did you learn anything?"

He growled something that sounded like an affirmative.

He stumped on a few paces, blew his nose violently on a handkerchief, and said: "Yes. About Darworth, and - other things too. Humph. Get the old residents if you want information, son. Stick to the pubs. There's been a woman seen visitin' that house from time to time....

"Ei, why didn't I guess it? I started to suspect it while we were at Darworth's house, but I don't mind tellin' you that I've very nearly made the biggest mistake of my life. ... Well. 'Tisn't irreparable; that's a consolation. If luck's with me, tomorrow night-maybe later, but I hope tomorrow night-I can introduce you to the coolest and quickest. thinking criminal devil that...”

"A woman?"

"I didn't say that, Shut up, now. Somebody knows more about that house than we do. Darworth was murdered partly because of it. Joseph was murdered to get him out of the way. And now...."

He had stopped on the pavement across the street from Magnolia Cottage. It looked bleak and sinister, with the constable pacing under the street-lamp, the sagging iron gate and the glimpse of a weedy brick walk. H.M. pointed.

"Darworth owned that house," he said casually.

"Then-?"

"Before the Sweeney woman took it, it stood vacant for I dunno how many years; no notice-board up; nobody could buy. But the old gossip-hands remember somebody of Darworth's description that used to come there. If it hadn't been for a peculiar bone-structure, that could be identified as long as eternity if the body ever got dug up; so Horseface says.... Son, I shouldn't be at all surprised if that's not where Elsie Fenwick is buried."

Round the corner of Hather Street whirled the lights of a police-car, its siren crying ahead. On a common impulse H.M. and I started across the road. We came up just as the car scraped in at the curb and three men in plain clothes got out. Masters, hurrying down the brick walk, held open the gate for them. One of the newcomers said, "Inspector Masters, sir!" and there was urgency in his voice.

"Well?"

"They said you'd probably be here, but there isn't a telephone here and we couldn't reach you. You're wanted back at the Yard...”

Masters' hands closed on the spikes of the gate. He seemed to have frozen there, and it was several seconds before he got out:

"Not-anything-another ?"

"Don't know, sir; may be. It's a call from Paris. Everybody in the translation department had gone home. Chap was jabbering French so fast the operator could only get half what he said. He said he'd call again at nine o'clock, and it's nearly half past eight now. It's important, sir, and it's something about murder. . ."

"Go through the routine, photographs, search and fingerprints," Masters said curtly. He jammed on his hat and hurried out to the car.

XVIII

THE WITCH ACCUSES

THAT was the night before the day of the startling accusation made by Lady Benning. During the fifteen hours that intervened, I had by pure accident stumbled on a point that nearly provided a solution to the riddle.

If this were anything but an account of facts, I should describe a breakneck rush back to town to intercept that call; an inquiry until far into the morning, without food or sleep. But a real murder case is not all "Thou-art-theMan." There are the intervals when you suddenly realize that the business of life must go on as usual; the intervals of torture and wit-puzzling, and of futile breathings on a mirror already beclouded. For instance, I had a. dinner engagement that night. It was with my sister, a gentle Gorgon, and it would never have occurred to any of the family to break an engagement with Agatha. In fact, my chief concern was in the realization - when I learned how late it was - that I should be an hour late even if I did not bother to dress. I had forgotten all about it; still, I must be there.

Masters drove us back to Town, and both the Inspector and I promised to be at H.M.'s office at eleven o'clock next morning. He was driving H.M. home to Brook Street; I dropped off in Piccadilly, caught a Kensington bus, and was pitched off at Agatha's in time to be smuggled in the side door for a brush-up before I faced whatever guests might be. Surprisingly, there was only Angela Payne, my sister's less superannuated crony, who is supposed to be my future wife. She was sitting by the fire in Agatha's cutglass drawing-room, wriggling with excitement and chewing that jade cigarette-holder which had nearly poked out so many people's eyes at intimate dinners. Angela is very modern, which I am not; she has her hair shorn and displays a great deal of back.

The moment I walked in, I knew I should be a Personage as a bearer of news about the murder, and pumped by two terrifying experts. That is probably why the dinner was so intimate. Agatha did not even mention my lateness. But, the moment we sat down to one of those clear soups which are about as sustaining as something the conjuror pours out of different jugs on the stage, the attack began. I was puzzling over the problem of Mrs. Sweeney, and kept the defense fairly well. Agatha had said to Angela, as though reprovingly, "Of course he can't tell us anything, but at least, in courtesy to me, he ought to explain his lateness."

During the fish, Angela tossed her bomb in among the candles. She asked when the inquest would be, and I said tomorrow.

"And," she inquired, "will poor Mr. Darworth's wife be here for it?"

This gave even my sister a surprise. "Was Mr. Darworth," she inquired, "a married man?"

"But I know her!" said Angela triumphantly.

At this point I had become so intent that I refused Sauterne. Angela said: "Well-good-looking, possibly, if you like that type. Thin. Tall. Brunette. They say, Agatha, dear, that she had low beginnings: in a circus or a Wild West show or something.... But an actress! Oh, yes, I'll admit..”

"You know her personally?"

"Well, not exactly. . . ." She was talking to Agatha now. "She would probably have run to fat by this time, because that was years ago. Don't you remember, my dear, the winter in Nice-'23 or '24 - I think the year dear Lady Bellows had such bad attacks of acute alcoholism, or am I thinking of somebody else that fell over the railing from f the dress circle, and all the rude people in the gallery positively laughed? - well, anyway, it was that English Repertory Company, and all the papers said it was so very fine? They were reviving Shakespeare," explained Angela, as though she were talking of movements for resuscitating the drowned, "and those delightful Restoration things by Which - Wycherley

"Don't hiccough, Angela," said my sister severely. "Well?"

"They said she was superb in that Twelfth Night thing, or one called `The Plain Dealer,' was it? But I didn't see those; I saw one where she was a middle-aged, heavy-set frump, something like a schoolmistress, you know, Agatha. ... Aren't you listening, Ken?"

I was.

"Mrs. Sweeney-" The alleged Mrs. Sweeney

When the duties of the evening were over, and I had got away without wringing anybody's neck, I walked back trying to puzzle the thing out. If Mrs. Sweeney were Glenda Watson Darworth, as seemed likely, then many things could be explained over a trail stretching far back into the past. Glenda Watson's personalities were many and various, but always profitable. She had fastened on Darworth, either by accident or design, back in the days when Darworth had bunglingly tried to poison a rich wife. She had been with Elsie Fenwick Darworth when the happy couple returned to England; she could have been, and undoubtedly had been, instrumental in the disappearance of the first wife. Darworth buys the house in Brixton; and what lay buried there-say in that filled-up well became a deep vein of blackmail. The humble assistant turns on Darworth, saying, "Buy my silence!" Or possibly, "Buy it with marriage." The erstwhile lady's maid sets herself up on the Riviera with Darworth's money, goes in for theatricals, amuses herself, and waits. There's the patient strength of mind for you: no marriage, no tightening the noose, until such time as it can become incontestably legal....

Then she reappears, with new plans and fresh notions for the plunder of the gullible. Has she still a hold over him? Yes. Even if Elsie Fenwick's bones were never found, bones that could be identified incontestably - and, on the evidence of a few bones, Eugene Aram was hanged eleven years after he had stabbed Daniel Clark in a cave - still Darworth's own record could not stand her threat to turn King's evidence.

So? I remember I was walking fast past the rails of Hyde Park at this point, mumbling to my pipe and arousing the curiosity of pedestrians. So what? It looked very much as though Glenda Watson constituted the brain behind Darworth's magnetic Front. She sets out to exploit, financially, his talents. All his victimizing of the wealthy credulous had begun - when? Four years ago, just after his marriage to Glenda Watson in Paris, and Mrs. Sweeney took up her secluded residence at Brixton. She is after money; quite content never to play actually the part of Darworth's wife ... because his appeal is to women, and he will be more valuable as a romantic bachelor.

But would she have been content to grub along in this minor part? And then I remembered: she didn't. There were those long absences from Brixton, of which we had heard: vacations of months during which Darworth was taking a holiday from his occult frauds, and Mrs. Sweeney became again the talented Mrs. Glenda Darworth at the Villa d'Ivry, Nice. She and Darworth were slowly building up a fortune; they had provided themselves with a half-witted scapegoat in case the police interfered...

But, unfortunately, this did not help us. When I got back to my flat, wet with perspiration from stalking along the streets like a two-miler, I resisted an impulse to get into communication with Masters. All this was probably true enough, but, so far as concerned the identity of the murderer, it only added another suspect to an already bewildering list. Where was the woman's motive for murder?

Besides, there is a fable about the goose and the golden eggs....

I went to bed, and, of course, overslept.

The morning of the 8th of September was fine and dear, with an autumnal tinge in the air. Far from being on time for the appointment at eleven o'clock, I did not wake up until nearly then. Breakfast was a matter of haste and profanity; I tried to scan the papers while hurrying towards Whitehall, and only gathered that the "Plague Court double tragedy" had erupted in one form or another on nearly every page. The gilt dock in the tower of the Horse Guards was striking the half hour as I turned down towards the Embankment. And, close down towards the garden behind the War Office, a purple touring-car was parked....

I should not have noticed it at all, having one eye on the newspaper, if it had not been for an impression that somebody in the tonneau had just jerked back out of sight. The back of the car was towards me, and I could have sworn that an eye was still peering out through the rear-window. Anyhow, I turned back to the little door that leads up to H.M.'s lair, just as the door opened. Marion Latimer came out, laughing, and Halliday behind her.

If there were anything weighing on the mind of either, you would never have known it. The girl was radiant, and Halliday looked better than he had looked for months. He had groomed himself from polished shoes to sandy mustache; the twinkle had come back to his heavy-lidded eyes, and he made a swaggering salute with his umbrella.

After saying, "What ho, what ho!" and uttering a variety of noises to indicate greeting, he added: "Thunder and lightning. Enter third murderer, and you look it. Go up and join the other two. Your friend H.M. is having a fine time, but poor old Masters is on the edge of homicidal mania. Ho ho ho. I will not be depressed today."

I said I supposed they had been on the grill. Marion was trying to keep back laughter; she punched Halliday in the ribs and said, "In public! Will you stop it? - I suppose you're invited to Mr. H.M.'s little party tonight, Mr. Blake? Dean's going. It's at Plague Court."

"We are going," he said firmly, "to motor to Hampton Court and have lunch. Who cares about tonight?" He took a swing at the air with his umbrella. "Come along, wench. I'm not likely to be arrested. Come along."

"It's all right," the girl told me, and looked round the street as though every stone in smoky London pleased her. "Mr. H.M. does buck you up, rather. He's a strange old fellow, and he keeps on telling me about the girl in the pictures who took off her clothes; but he - well, you believe in him. He says everything's all right, and he'll tell me where Ted is, and everything.... I say, I'm sorry, but I can't control Dean...."

I watched them cross the street, Halliday twirling his umbrella and apparently using it for a pointer in a lecture about the beauties of London; down past the yellowing trees, and towards the smoky river glistening beyond the parapet. They did not see the touring-car, or seemed not to do so. They were both laughing.

Up in H.M.'s office I found a different scene. H.M., who had neglected to put on a necktie that day, was piled into his usual chair with his feet on the desk, sleepily smoking a cigar. Masters was glowering out of the window.

"There's news," I said, "and it may be big news. Look here, through sheer chance last night I discovered who Mrs…."

H.M. took the cigar out of his mouth.

"Son," he observed, squinting down it through his big spectacles, "if you're about to tell us what I think you are, then I must warn you you're goin' to be murderously assaulted. By Inspector Humphrey Masters. Eh, Masters? The French they are a funny race. Burn me, but it appalls the Anglo-Saxon mind how you can print slap out in a Frog newspaper things that'd get you in a libel-suit if you whispered 'em in this room." He waved a paper. "Voici `l'Intransigeant,' mon tres cher panier de salade. Ecoutez. 'LE MYSTERE DE PLAGUE COURT. UNE PROBLEMS FORMIDABLE! MAIS RIEN NEST DIFFICILE POUR NOTRE CHEF DE SURETE, M. LAVOISIER GEORGES DURRAND!' Nous aeons l'honneur de vous presenter" ---"Want to hear it?" inquired H.M., leering. "Public official has a cut at solving the thing. Y'see, the whole trouble is this. . .

A buzzer sounded at his desk. He pressed another, took his feet off the desk, and his whole expression changed.

"To your posts," he said. "Lady Benning is on her way up."

Masters turned round sharply. "Lady Benning? What's she want?"

"I think she wants to accuse somebody of murder," said H.M.

Nobody spoke. Smoky sunlight lay on the frayed rug, and dust motes moved in it. But the mere pronouncing of that name, Lady Benning, had somehow put a chill on us. She was here and everywhere; unseen, but a presence.

During what seemed like minutes we waited. Then we heard a tap on the staircase out in the hall; a pause, then another tap. She had condescended at last to use a cane. I remembered the purple touring-car parked in the street, and who must have been watching as those others went past in uproarious happiness.... The tapping came on....

Your first impression was pity; not altogether for the infirmity. Masters opened the door for her, and she came in smiling. On the night before last you might have guessed her age as sixty; now you could have added many more years. The Watteau marquise was still there, in her way; yet now she had bedaubed it too much with rouge, lip-salve, and rather unsteady eyebrow-penciling. The eyes were brilliantly alive, and they smiled and roved.

"So you are all here, gentlemen," she said, in a voice that cracked slightly and raised in the scale. She made a delicate attempt at clearing her throat. "That is good. That is very good. And may I sit down? Thank you so much." She nodded her large hat, under which the waves of the white hair curved, and it shadowed the wrinkles. "I have heard my late husband speak of you, Sir Henry. So good of you to allow me to see you."

"Well, ma'am?" said H.M.

He spoke sharply, with the deliberate intent of rousing her; but, as she only smiled and blinked, he prompted:

"You said that you had a communication of some sort you wished to make?"

"Dear Sir Henry. And you-and you-" After a pause she took one hand off her cane and put her fingers gently on his desk. "Are you all blind?"

"Blind, ma'am?"

"Do you mean that clever men like you - and you - haven't seen? Must I tell you? Do you really mean that you don't know why dear Theodore left town and rushed away to his mother in that mad hurry? Either out of fear, or in case he should have to tell what he might not wish to tell? Don't you know what he guessed, and now he knows?"

H.M.'s dull eyes flickered open. She leaned abruptly towards him. Her voice was still low, but it was as though another of Darworth's ghoulish toys say a fantastic, unholy jack-in-the-box-had snapped open.

"That Marion Latimer is mad," said Lady Benning.

Silence....

"Oh, I know!" She spoke more sharply, and peered at us. "I know how you would be deceived. You think that because a girl is young, and pretty, and can laugh at your man's jokes, and goes swimming and diving and playing tennis on two strong legs, that there can't be any maggot up here. Don't you? Don't you?" she demanded, and her glance flickered round again. "You wouldn't hesitate to believe it of me, though. And why? Because I am old, and because I believe things you are simply too blind to see. That's why; that's the only reason.

"All the Melishes are rotten with insanity. I could have told you that. Sara Melish, that girl's mother, is kept under observation in Edinburgh.... But if you won't believe what I tell you, won't you believe plain evidence?"

"Humph. Such as-?"

"The voice in Ted's room that morning!" She apparently caught some expression on H.M.'s face, for she kept smiling and nodding. "Why did you all so easily assume it was an outsider? Was it likely that an outsider should be on the balcony at that hour of the morning? But, you see, the balcony runs all around the house: past dear Marion's bedroom.... But was it a wonder that a poor kitchen-maid was deceived in the voice? Dear Sir Henry, she had never heard it before-speaking in that manner. That was the dear girl's real voice. What else can one make of the words, `You never suspected it, did you?"

I heard hard breathing behind me. Masters lumbered past and up to H.M.'s desk.

"Ma'am," he said, "ma'am"

"Shut up, Masters," said H.M. softly.

"And that dear gullible police-sergeant of yours, that Mr. McDonnell you sent to spy on us before," continued Lady Benning, lifting and lowering her fingers on the desk. Her painted face moved snakily around. "He called on poor Marion at an inconvenient hour yesterday afternoon. She got rid of him - oh, so easily, the dear clever girl! She had to go out. Oh, yes. She had other work to do."

Lady Benning giggled. Then her head jerked up.

"I believe the inquest is to be held this afternoon, Sir Henry. I shall perform my duty. I shall go into the box and accuse poor Marion of the murder of Roger Darworth and of Joseph Dennis."

The silence after those sharply enunciated words was broken by H.M:'s thoughtful voice: "Now, ma'am, that's most interestin'. You won't be able to do, it this afternoon, of course; I forgot to tell you there's been an adjournment---"

She leaned again. It was like a pounce. "Ah! You believe me, don't you? I can see it in your face. Dear Sir Henry... . "

"But it's interestin'. It shows rather a change of attitude, don't it? I wasn't there, and all I know is what I read, but didn't you say Darworth had got himself done in by ghosts?"

Her little eye gleamed like a crumb of glass. Say that, and you touch the fanatic. "Make no mistake, my friend. If they had chosen to kill Mr. Darworth- "

There was a late and somnolent fly drumming along the edge of H.M.'s desk. Her black-gloved hand shot out. The next moment she brushed the dead thing softly to the carpet; then she dusted her hands together, smiled at H.M., and went on evenly: "That is why I supposed it, you see. But when the unfortunate imbecile was murdered, I knew that they had only stood by in their power, and watched a human being commit these murders. In a way, it was their direction. Oh, yes. They were instrumental. But they chose a human agent." Slowly she lifted herself across his desk; and, leaning nearly in his face, scrutinized H.M. with a hideous earnestness. "You do believe me? You do believe me, don't you?"

H.M. rubbed his forehead. "It seems to me, now that I remember it, something about Miss Latimer and Halliday holdin' hands. . .

She was a wise general. She knew the value of not saying too much; she knew the value of her effects. After carefully watching H.M.'s face-and, in general, card-players have found this a highly unprofitable proceeding - she seemed satisfied. There was a thin frosty light of triumph about her. She got to her feet, and so did H.M. and I.

"Good-by, dear Sir Henry," she said softly, at the door. "I shall not take up your time. And holding hands?" She giggled again, raised her hand and wagged a finger at us. "Surely my dear nephew is chivalrous enough to uphold her if she cares to say that? It is the simple conduct of a gentleman. Besides, you know, he may have been deceived." Her face assumed a sly and coquettish simper. "Who knows? In her absence, he may have been holding mine."

The door closed. We heard the cane slowly tap-tapping down the hall.

"Sit still!" said H.M., as Masters made a movement forward. His command rang in the ugly quiet. "Be still, you fool. Don't go after her."

"My God," said Masters, "do you mean to tell me she's right?"

"I'm only tellin' you we've got to work fast, son. Take a chair. Light a cigar. Be calm." He hoisted his feet on the desk again, and drowsily blew smoke-rings. "Look here, Masters. Did you have any suspicions of the Latimer girl?"

"I'll be honest about it, sir. I never even considered it."

"That's bad. On the other hand, y'see, the mere fact that she was the farthest from suspicion don't necessarily mean she's guilty. Things'd be too easy like that. Find the unlikeliest person - call the Black Maria. The trap is that, since it don't seem likely, you'll believe it all the more. Besides, in this case it happens to be the most likely one who's guilty....

"But who is the most likely one?"

H.M. chuckled. "That's been the trouble with the case; we haven't been able to see it. Still, at my little party tonight ... by the way, you didn't know about it, did you, Ken? Plague Court at eleven o'clock sharp. This will be strictly stag. I want you, and young Halliday, and Bill Featherton.... Masters, you're not to be with us; I'll give you your instructions presently. I'll need some extra men for help, but they'll come from my own department. Shrimp's the man I want, if I can find him."

"All right," the Inspector agreed wearily. "Whatever you say, sir. If you'll agree to introduce me to the murderer, I'll do anything in this nightmare of a business. I'm just about crazy, and that's a fact. After that fiasco of Mrs. Sweeney "

"You know about it?" I interrupted, and hastened to lay out my information. Masters nodded.

"Every time we get a lead," he said, "even a small one, it's cut out almost as soon as it's mentioned.... Yes, I know. That was Durrand's brain-wave. That was the reason he dragged me in with a trunk-call from Paris that we had to pay for. He found out about Glenda Darworth; and then that there were long periods when she was not seen in Nice. I'll admit he got me excited about the thing.... H.M. waved his cigar in the air.

"Burn me," he said admiringly, "Masters was inspired with a real joie de vivre, he was. Back he goes to Magnolia Cottage a-flying, with a female searcher in tow. So they leap on Mrs. Sweeney with triumphant shouts, and then they discover that something's wrong. No padding. No wig....”

"But, blast it,, the woman isn't young any more," Masters protested; "she mightn't have needed any disguise-"

H.M. pushed over the copy of l'Intransigeant. There was a large photograph labeled, "Mme. Darworth." "Full measurements here, son. It was taken eight years ago; but eight years ain't long enough to change brown eyes to black, alter the shape of a nose, mouth, and chin, and add four inches to height.... Well, Ken, Masters was wild. Not so much as La Sweeney, I'll admit. More so as good old Durrand put through another call this morning, at the Yard's expense, saying, 'Alas, one is desolated. One fears, my old one, that this handsome small idea will not march. One finds that Madame Darworth has herself telephoned from her other flat, which discovers itself at Paris, to appellate one a species of large imbecile. Truly, it is unfortunate.' Then he rings off, and the exchange says, 'Three pound nineteen and fourpence, please.' Ho. ho."

"All right," said Masters bitterly. "Go on. Have a good time. You yourself said that Elsie Fenwick is buried close to that cottage; you said – “

"She is, son."

"Then-?" "Tonight," said H.M., "you'll see. All this is a clue, but not the kind you think it is. It leads to London, not Paris or Nice. It leads to somebody you've seen and talked to, and yet never once more than suspected a little bit. Yes, the person's been under suspicion; but not very much. The person who used that dagger, and stoked the furnace, and has been laughing at us behind the best kind of mask all the way through this case....”

"Tonight," said H.M., "I'm goin' to have somebody murdered exactly as Darworth was murdered. You'll be there, and the stroke will come straight over your shoulder, and yet you may not see it. Everybody might be there, including Louis Playge."

He rolled up his big head. The pale sun behind him silhouetted a bulk still lazy, but irresistible and deadly.

"And the person ain't goin' to laugh-much longer."

XIX

THE DUMMY THAT WORE A MASK

THERE was a bright moon over the little stone house. It was a cold night; so cold that sounds acquired a new sharpness, and breath hung in smoke on the luminous air. The moon probed down into the well of the black buildings round the yard of Plague Court; it etched flat shadows, and the shadow of a crooked tree lay across our path.,

A face was looking at us out of the door of the little stone house, which stood open. It was a pallid and rigid face, which yet seemed to be winking one eye.

Halliday, at my elbow, jerked back with an exclamation that he stifled in his throat. Major Featherton muttered something, and for a second we did not move.

Far away and muffled, a City clock began to toll out the hour of eleven. In the door and windows of the house shone a glow of red firelight. And, motionless, its hands crossed in its lap, something was sitting tall on a chair before the fire; and the face was hanging over one shoulder with a witless smirk on the bluish-white features; with a drooping mustache, and one eyebrow raised over goggling spectacles. There seemed to be drops of sweat on its forehead.

I could have sworn the thing grinned....

It was not a nightmare, suddenly coming down on us. It was as real as the night and the moon, which we met after we had come up through the echoing passage to Plague Court, round in the dark yard past the ruined arbor.

"That," said Halliday loudly, and pointed, "that's the damned thing - or something like it - I saw when I came out here alone the night before.”

A big shadow moved across the firelight inside. Somebody peered out and hailed us, blotting away the white-faced thing behind.

"Good," said H.M.'s voice. "I rather thought it might 'a' been, d’ye see, after what you said this morning. That's why I used James's mask in makin' my dummy. It's the dummy we're goin' to use for the experiment... Come on in, come on in!" he added testily. "This place is full of drafts."

H.M.'s elephantine figure, in the fur-collared coat and the ancient top-hat, only enhanced the evil grotesquerie of the room inside. An enormous fire, too big a fire, ran with a roar up the black chimney. A table had been set up before the fire; a table and five kitchen chairs, of which only one had a complete back. Supported on one chair, and propped sideways against the table, sat a life-sized dummy roughly constructed of canvas filled with sand. It was even fitted out with an old coat and trousers, and on its head a rakish felt hat held in place the painted mask where a face should have been. The effect was one of jaunty horror, enhanced by a pair of white cotton gloves sewn to the sleeves in such fashion that the dummy seemed to have its hands placed together as though praying....

"It's good, ain't it?" inquired H.M. with admiring complacency. He had his finger in the pages of a book, and his chair had been drawn up on the opposite side of the table. "When I was a kid, I used to make the best Fifth-ofNovember Guys in London. There wasn't time to make this one more elaborate. Blasted thing's heavy, too. Weighs as much as a full-grown man."

"Brother James-" said Halliday. He wiped his hand across his forehead, and tried to laugh. "I say, you go in for realism, don't you? What are you going to do with it?"

"Kill it," said H.M. "There's the dagger on the table."

I looked away from the bulging eyes of the dummy, the goggling spectacles and rabbit-like smile under the mustache as the thing sat with its hands together against the firelight. On the table a single candle burned in a brass holder, just as it had been last night. There were some sheets of paper and a fountain-pen. There was also-blackened with fire from bone handle to point - Louis Playge's knife.

"Dash it, Henry," said Major Featherton, clearing his, throat. The major looked strange in an ordinary bowler and tweed coat; less imposing, and more like a querulous elderly man with asthma and a face colored by too much tippling. He coughed. "After all, I mean to say, this seems merely damned childish. Dummies and whatnot, eh? Look here, I'm in favor of any reasonable thing—“

"You needn't try to avoid those stains on the floor," said H.M., watching him. "Or on the walls, either. They're dry."

We all glanced at what he indicated, but we all looked back at the smirking dummy. It was the most evil thing

there. The fire threw out a fierce heat, moving its shadows on the red-lit walls....

"Somebody bolt the door," said H.M.

"Good God, what is this?" demanded Halliday.

"Somebody bolt the door," repeated H.M. with sleepy insistence. "You do it, Ken. Make sure. Oh, you hadn't noticed that the door'd been repaired? Yes. One of my lads did it this afternoon. Clumsy job, but it'll do. Hop to it."

The bolt, after the wrenchings it had got that night, was more stiff then ever. I pulled the door shut and with a fairly powerful jerk got the bolt into place. The iron bar across it had been moved up vertically; I yanked it down and with several fist-poundings got it firmly wedged in the iron nests along the door.

"Now," said H.M., "'now,' as the ghost observed in the story, 'we're locked in for the night.' "

Everybody jumped a little, for one reason or another. H.M. stood by the fire, his hat on the back of his head. The firelight shone on his glasses; but no muscle moved in his big face. His mouth was drawn down sourly, and his little eyes moved from one to the other of us.

"Now, about your chairs. Bill Featherton, I want you sitting on the left hand side of the fireplace. Pull the chair out and a little away from it-that's it. Dammit, don't bother about your trousers; do as I tell you! You sit next in order, Ken . . . about four feet away from Bill; so. The dummy's next, sittin' by the table, but we'll turn him round like a companionable feller, to face the fire. The other side of the table - you there, Mr. Halliday. I'll complete the little semi-circle, thus."

He dragged his own chair over to the far side of Halliday, but set it down sideways to the chimney-corner, so that he could look along the little line we formed.

"Humph. Now, let's see. Conditions are exactly as they were night before last, with one exception. . . ." Fumbling in his pocket, he drew out a gayly colored box and tossed its contents at the fire.

"Here!" roared Major Featherton. "I say-!”

First there were sparks, and a greenish light rolled out of the blaze. Then, in thick clouds, an overpowering wave of sickly smelling incense crept out and curled sluggishly up along the floor. Its odor seemed to get in my very pores.

"Got to do it," said H.M. in a matter-of-fact voice. "It ain't my artistic taste; it's the murderer's."

Wheezing, he sat down and blinked along the line.

There was a silence. I looked over my right shoulder at the dummy, leering at the fire with its black hat jauntily cocked over where the ear should be; and I had a horrible fancy, What if that damned thing should come alive? Beyond it was Halliday, grown quiet and satirical now. The candle burned on the table between him and the dummy, and flickered as the incense rose up. It was the sheer absurdity of the thing which made it come close to the terrible.

"Now that we're all locked in here nice and cozy," said H.M., and his voice echoed in the little stone room, "I'm goin' to tell you what happened night before last."

Halliday scratched a match to light a cigarette; but he broke the head off, and he did not try again.

"You'll imagine," continued H.M. drowsily, "that you're in the positions you occupied then. Think back, now, to where everybody was. But we'll take up Darworth first; the dummy indicates him, and" - H.M. took his watch out of his pocket, leaned across the table, and laid it down -"we got some time to spare before somebody I'm expectin' arrives here tonight....”

"I've already told you some of what Darworth's done; I repeated it to Ken and the major yesterday, and to Halliday and Miss Latimer this morning. I told you about the confederate, and what was planned....”

"We'll start from where Darworth murders the cat; and that's where I began sittin' and thinkin'."

"Not to interrupt," said Halliday; "but who are you expecting tonight?"

"The police," said H.M.

After a pause he got his pipe out of his pocket and went on:

"Now, we've established that Darworth killed that cat with Louis Playge's dagger, by the punctures and rips in its throat. Very well; afterwards he's got the blood to splash hereabouts, he's got himself smeared up a bit - but that will pass unnoticed in the dark, under coat and gloves, if he doesn't see anybody, but gets Featherton and young Latimer to rush him out and lock him in here immediately. Point really is: What did he do with that dagger? Eh?

"Only two things he could 'a' done: (1) He could have brought it in here with him, or (2) Passed it to his confederate.

"Take the second point first, my lads. If he passed it to a confederate, that'd mean that his confederate had to be either young Latimer or Bill Featherton... " Here H.M. sleepily raised the lids from his eyes, as though expecting a protest.

Nobody spoke. We could hear the watch ticking on the table.

"Because those were the only two with him, to whom he could have passed it. Now, it's not reasonable that he did such a fat-headed thing. Why hand it over to the confederate merely to take into the big house and bring out again? - runnin', meantime, the risk of being seen giving it to the confederate by the other person who's not in the plot, and the even bigger risk entailed by the confederate carryin' around a blood-stained dagger which will give the show away if anybody in the front room happens to spot it. No, no; Darworth took it into this room with him. That's the reasonin'.

"As a matter of fact, I knew from another cause that he did take it in; but we'll pass over that other cause for a minute: I'm showin' you the obvious reasons for things. ... Well, speak up, somebody!" he added with a sudden sharp look. "What dye gather from that?"

Halliday turned round from gazing blankly at the watch.

"But what about," he said, "what about the dagger that touched the back of Marion's neck?"

"Humph. That's better. Exactly. What about it? Son, that apparently inconsistent point clears up a big difficulty. Somebody was prowlin' in the dark. Was that person holdin' another dagger? If so, the whole point is that he or she was holdin' it in a very odd way; an unnatural way; a way nobody under heaven ever carried a dagger

before. Mind you, she wasn't touched by the blade, but by the handle and hilt, so that the person must have been gripping it under the hilt, by the blade.... What is it, son, that you do naturally hold like that? What is it that is shaped rather like a dagger, so that a mind running on daggers might possibly mistake it for one in the

dark ... ?"

"Well?"

"It was a crucifix," said H.M.

"Then Ted Latimer-?" I said, after a pause that seemed to echo like thunder. "Ted Latimer—?"

"As I say, I was sittin' and thinkin'. And I thought a good deal about the psychological puzzle of Ted Latimer, both before and after we heard how he come home with a little crucifix in his hand....”

"Y'know, that half-cracked young feller would have concealed that crucifix from you quicker and deeper than he'd have concealed a crime. He would honestly have considered himself shamed if you had thought that he, the intellectual snipe, carried it because he reverenced it or thought it holy: which he would say he didn't at all.... And that's the dancin', topsy-turvy puzzle of people nowadays. They'll sneer at a great thing like the Christian Church, but they'll believe in astrology. They won't believe the clergyman who says there's something in the heavens; but they will believe the rather less mild statement that you can read the future there like an electric sign. They think there's something old-fashioned and provincial about believing too thoroughly in God, but they will concede you any number of deadly earthbound spirits: because the latter can be defended by scientific jargon.

"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."

It was close on two o'clock in the morning. We had come back to H.M.'s office, roused the night watchman, and stumbled up the four flights of stairs to the Owl's Nest. The watchman built us a fire, and H.M. insisted on brewing a bowl of whisky punch to celebrate. Halliday, Featherton, and I sat in the decrepit leather chairs about H.M.'s desk while he came back with the boiling water.

"Once you'd got the essential clue, that Joseph was Glenda Darworth all the time, the rest is easy. Trouble is, there was so much wool and padding round the business that it was last night before I tumbled to it. Another

thing got in the way, too; I can see that now.... "But, look here!" grumbled the major, who was struggling to light a cigar. "It can't be! What I want to know is--"

"You're goin' to hear it," said H.M., "as soon as we get comfortable. This water should be what the Irish call `screeching hot '- just a minute-that sugar, now! ..."

"And also," said Halliday, "how she happened to be in that yard a couple of hours ago, and who fired those shots through the window tonight; and how the devil the murderer reached the roof in the first place"

H.M. said, "Drink first!" After the punch had been tasted, and H.M. flattered on its quality, he grew more expansive. He settled down so that the light of the desk lamp did not get in his eyes, stretched his feet on the desk with an expiring sigh, and began talking to his glass.

"The funny part was, Ken and old Durrand in Paris stumbled slap on the whole explanation, even to the dead give-away of the business, if they'd only had the sense to apply it to the right person. But they picked on poor Mrs. Sweeney; naturally, I suppose, becoz Joseph was apparently lyin' burned to a cinder on a morgue-slab with the dagger in his back.

"Son, in essentials that theory was absolutely right. Glenda Darworth was the strong-minded, bleed-their-purses lady; the brain behind Darworth's personality; and she'd have played the part of a Cherokee Indian if it had helped their game. Trouble is, you had to look farther than Mrs. Sweeney. Because why? Because Mrs. Sweeney was never in the thick of things; she was never in a position where she could keep an eye on the people and make strategic moves unobserved; all she did was sit at home and be a respectable housekeeper for a weak-minded boy.

But Joseph - well, if you're considerin' a suspect to occupy that position, Joseph jumps out at you. He was never out of the middle of things, because he was the medium. They had to have him; he was indispensable; and not one thing could occur without his knowing it. And you had the complete answer, Ken, when that lady friend of yours deliberately told you the names of the plays in which Glenda Darworth had made her big hits. . . . Remember 'em?"

"One," I said, "was Shakespeare's `Twelfth Night', and the other was Wycherley's `The Plain Dealer'."

Halliday whistled. "Viola!" he said. "Hold on a bit! Isn't Viola the heroine who dresses in boy's clothes to follow the hero-"

"Uh. And I was glancin' over the other one, `The Plain Dealer'," vouchsafed H.M., chuckling, "while I was waitin' for you in the stone house tonight. What did I do with that book?" He fished in his pocket. "And Fidelia, the heroine there, does exactly the same thing. It's a rare good play for entertainment. Burn me, did you know they were crackin' Scotch jokes in 1675? The Widow Blackacre refers to a wench as a Scotch Warming Pan. Heh-heh-heh. Never mind. . . . But those two plays, with exactly the same kind of part, stretch the thing a bit too far to be coincidence. If you fatheads only had a little more erudition, you'd 'a' spotted Glenda much sooner. However"

"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 seance - 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-effects? 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 allowingsomebody 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 nearly 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 dose 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 check suits, always distinguishable 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 side-show; 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 lever 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 less sleepy.,

"fifth, my fatheads, have you forgotten that seance of automatic-writing at Bill Featherton's? Have you forgotten that seance 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.

"He's not a bad young feller. The woman had simply got him where she wanted him, that's all.... He didn't know she was going to murder Ted Latimer, and dress Ted in those glaring loud clothes and shove him into the furnace-"

"What?" shouted Halliday.

"Humph. Didn't I tell you that?" H.M. inquired blandly. "Yes. Y'see, Joseph had to disappear.. Glenda Darworth didn't mean for there to be any more murders; she was simply goin' to fade out, let the police think what they might, and reappear as Glenda Darworth to claim her two hundred and fifty thousand pounds. But Ted Latimer spotted Joseph when Ted slipped out that night. And so, y'see, Ted had to die."

XXI

THE END OF IT

HALLIDAY got up and walked aimlessly about the room. With his back to us, he stared into the fire. "This," he said, "this will just about kill Marion.... "Sorry, son," said H.M. gruffly. "I - well, y'see, I

couldn't tell you two this afternoon. It might have spoiled my game for tonight. And I sort of thought, 'Well,' I thought, 'they're pretty happy, those two. They've been through hell and blight for some time; they've had a crack-brained hag of an aunt riding 'em as badly as Darworth ever did, and even accusing one of 'em of murder when she saw they were happy; and there's no use darkening one day now."'

He spread his fingers and inspected them sulkily.

"Yes, the kid's dead. He was a good deal the height and build of `Joseph', you remember? That's what made it possible. It was very nearly spoiled when that workman Watkins looked through the cellar window and spotted the murderer at work. But, d'ye see, it was the fact that convinced us Joseph was really dead. He saw only the back of the person on the floor; he saw those clothes - those bright checked clothes; didn't I tell you to remember them -which he'd seen Joseph wearing every day. And the window-pane was dusty, and only one candle was burnin'; who wouldn't assume it was Joseph? ... Oh, the woman was clever enough. Pouring kerosene on that body, pushing it in the furnace, wouldn't have been necessary; it was unnecessary brutality; if she hadn't only wanted to make identification impossible. They'd get a charred mass out, with a few shreds of Joseph's clothes and a pair of his shoes, and there you are. It was an opportunity, and she took advantage of it. Why do you think she chloroformed him? Why, to get him bundled into Joseph's clothes before she stabbed him with the dagger. That's why they were so long together in the house before he was chucked in the furnace."

Halliday whirled round.

"And this fellow McDonnell?"

"Steady, son. Go easy, now.... I saw him tonight; I saw him just before I went to Plague Court. Y'see I knew

his father. I knew old Grosbeak very well." "So-what?"

"He swore to me he didn't know there was goin' to be a murder; he didn't know Darworth was to be killed at all. Maybe I'd better tell you about it.

"I come up to him and said, `Son, are you off duty now?' and he said, `Yes.' So I asked him where he lived, and he said a flat in Bloomsbury, and I suggested that he invite me over for a drink. I could tell then he knew something was wrong. When we got there he put the latch on the door, and turned on the light; then he just turned round and said flat-out, 'Well?' So I said, `McDonnell, I thought a lot of your father, and that's why I'm here. She's only been playing you on the string, and you know it now, don't you?' I said, `She's the ace of she-bloodsuckers, and she's got certain characteristics of the devil; and, since she burnt poor Latimer out at Magnolia Cottage, you know that now too, don't you? "'

"What did he do?"

"Nothing. He just stood there and looked at me, but he turned a funny color. Then he put his hands over his eyes for a second; and sat down, and finally he said, 'Yes, I know it - now.'

"Then we didn't say anything, but I smoked my pipe and watched him, and afterwards I said, `Why not tell me about it?" H.M. rubbed his big hand wearily across his forehead. "He asked me why he should, so I said: 'After your friend Glenda killed young Latimer yesterday afternoon she put on her regular woman's clothes and took the night Dover-Calais service over the Channel and got into Paris late last night. She'd cleaned everything out of the house that could incriminate her,' I said. 'She turned up in Paris this morning as Darworth's wife. At my request, Darworth's solicitor cabled her, to come to England for the adjustment of financial affairs. She's answered that she will be at Victoria at nine-thirty tonight. It's now a quarter to eight, and there's no way of reaching her. When she gets in, Inspector Masters will meet her at the station and ask her to come to Scotland Yard. At eleven o'clock she'll be escorted to Plague Court to witness a little exhibition of mine.' I said, 'She's done for, son. She'll be arrested tonight.'

"Well, he sat there a long time with his hands over his eyes. He said, `Do you think you can convict her?' And I said, 'You know damned well I can.' Then he nodded his head a couple of times, and said, 'Well, that finishes both of us. Now I'll tell you the story.' And he did."

Halliday strode up to the desk. "What did you do? Where is he?"

"Better hear what he had to say first," suggested H.M. mildly. "Sit down. I'll sketch it out, if you like....

"Most of it you know. How it was the woman's idea that she and Darworth should set up in this line of mulcting the gullible - although she always swore to McDonnell Darworth forced her into it - and, with long intervals between, they've been hooking various people for about four years. Darworth was to pose as the romantic bachelor, as a bait for the women; she was the dull medium who should arouse no suspicion in Darworth's lady friends. And it all went well until two things happened, (1) Darworth fell for Marion Latimer, and (2) last July McDonnell was sent to get a line on Darworth's activities by the police, and discovered who `Joseph' was.

"It happened by accident; he stumbled on the 'mysterious lady' leaving Magnolia Cottage in her proper costume, and trailed her. What happened subsequently isn't very clear from what he told me, but I gather she used every one of her own tricks to shut his mouth. It seems McDonnell went on a holiday not long afterwards; and spent it with Mrs. Darworth at her villa in Nice.... Oh, yes. When the persuasive Glenda put herself out to be fascinating, by God, she was fascinating! Incidentally, while McDonnell was telling me this, he kept saying, 'How could you know how beautiful she is? You never saw her except in that make-up!' over and over again. Son, it was a bit o' real ghastliness to hear him pleading that, as though it were an excuse. He even rushed to a drawer and got out a lot of photographs, all the time he was tellin' about murder; and I was readin' between the lines....

"Do you know what I was readin' between the lines, and why good old Glenda took such pains to win him over so he'd do anything she liked? By that time she was beginning to realize Darworth's little game. Darworth purported to be bleeding the Benning circle, and handling the Plague Court matter for their mutual benefit; but Glenda knew all about the Latimer girl, so she determined to-"

"Beat him to the punch, eh?" said Halliday bitterly. "Nice little girl. Ha. Just in case he tries to shove arsenic in her coffee, she'll return the compliment and collect two hundred thousand.... Good. Marion should hear all this. It'd please her to think----"

"No offense, old son," said H. M. "But that's about it. Oh, y'see, she pretended to believe Darworth when he told her all this; meantime, she was pourin' out a tale of suffering into McDonnell's ears. Darworth's dominating will had forced her to do all this: why? Because she was afraid of him, because he had murdered his first wife and she was afraid he might murder her-"

"And McDonnell believed all that?" snapped Halliday. "Rot!"

"Are you sure," said H.M. quietly, "you haven't believed even rawer things in the last six months? Steady. Let me go on. Well, meantime, there was a real danger that Darworth might take it into his head to do just that: dispose of his second wife as he disposed of the first, by smothering her with a pillow and burying the remains. Glenda never could tell. Those two were playing a gentle, polite, murderous game against each other; and, if Marion Latimer had given Darworth more encouragement, he might have had a shot at it. That worried Glenda. She didn't want any hanky-panky until she could get her knife into him. Darworth never anticipated any physical attack from her; he thought the most she'd do was threaten to expose him.

"So, when Darworth got his idea of a ghost-attack at Plague Court, Glenda must have danced the saraband. `Mine enemy is delivered,' said Glenda, `into-' and the rest of it. Meantime, she twines herself round Darworth and says, 'You'd never want to hurt me, would you?' And Darworth, who had rosy visions of seein' her tucked away underground with a dose of cyanide in her stomach, pats her head and says, `Of course not.' `Good,' says Glenda, twistin' his coat-button lovingly; 'because if you did, sweetheart, it would be just too bad.'

"'Come, come,' says Darworth gently; `refrain from such language, my dear. Forget that you were brought up in a circus, and that the only Shakespearean parts you ever understood were Doll Tearsheet and Petruchio's wife. Why so?' `Because,' says she, turning up those eyes of hers-and they're damn' attractive eyes-`there may be somebody besides myself who knows you killed Elsie Fenwick.... And if anything ever happens to me-?'

"You get the idea?" demanded H.M. "She was going to scare Darworth properly, in case he should try any funny business. Probably he didn't believe her when she told him that, but he was worried. If somebody else did know it, down would come all his plans on La Latimer-excuse me, son - down would come everything; and if his confounded wife had been indiscreet, he might find himself had up on a murder charge over a dozen years old...."

"I say!" growled Major Featherton, who had been pulling hard at his mustache. "Then at my house - at my house, blast it - she has this chap McDonnell slide that message into his papers? Eh?"

"You got it," nodded H.M. "At a place, dye see, where Joseph wasn't even present! Burn me, do you wonder he was scared green? Because it would seem that one of this very circle - one of these people his plans were directed at-knew all about him, and was sardonically chuckling! It must have hit him straight across the back of the neck: one of those devoted acolytes of his was as bland and dangerous a hypocrite as himself. His immediate reaction was, `I've got to put this Plague Court hoax through as quickly as I can.' Because why? Because somebody seemed out to queer his pitch, and he wanted to make his final smash to impress the Latimer girl; but, good God, which one of 'em had put that note in? Then he had time to reflect that there was a stranger, and it was probably the stranger ... yet, when he questioned Ted Latimer about McDonnell, he got only the reply that it was a harmless old school friend. He suspected, but what could he do? I needn't tell you that McDonnell's apparently accidental falling in with Ted, his wangling of an invitation to Featherton's, was no more an accident than Darworth's death....

"And he walked straight into the trap he'd created for himself, Darworth did. You know what happened. McDonnell swears he didn't know Glenda intended to kill him. He says she told him Darworth had promised her that, if she aided him in this last piece of fraud, he would let her go. And so, night before last, there's the delirious McDonnell waitin' in the yard - not needed, not in the plot, but just in case! And you know how he was needed: ayagh, didn't it give him a shock when he saw Masters there? You'll admit he thought fast; he had to account for his presence there - which wasn't natural - so he gave rather a distorted version of the truth. You remember how he was the one, as I told you, who insisted `Joseph' was only a pawn for Darworth?"

"But why say Joseph was a drug-addict?" demanded Halliday.

"Those, my lad, were his instructions from Glenda," said H.M. dryly, "in case anybody questioned him. He didn't understand 'em then-but he understood 'em later on....”

"His account of the thing to me tonight - I wish I could reproduce it. He tells how he was nearly at his wits' end to get Masters out of the room. He wanted to urge Glenda, now that the police were there, to abandon the crazy design of the fraudulent attack. She wouldn't. In fact - d'you remember, from what Masters said? - she nearly blew the gaff herself. While Masters was there, she had the nerve to go over and make sure the boards were loose on the window of the room where she and McDonnell had been put...:'

"The boards on the window?" interrupted Halliday.

"Sure. Have you forgotten that the wall round Plague Court runs within three feet of the windows in the house? And that they're high windows, from which a good jumper could get to the top of the wall with one swing? That was how she walked round to the back of the house without leaving a footprint; she went on top of the wall. And you know what she did. She left McDonnell there while Masters was prowlin' upstairs - the whole shooting would take only three or four minutes. She and Darworth had prepared the whole scene the night before; you, Halliday, blundered in on them in your travels, and I don't know how they played ghost on you, but it seems they succeeded....”

"Meantime, somebody meshed more gears, and caused trouble for us. Ted Latimer got up and sneaked out of the other room. What happened is probably this. Instead of goin' straight through the house - he could see your light, Ken, in the kitchen where you were lookin' over that manuscript - he thought he'd escape observation if he went outside and round the house. Well, he'd no sooner got out on the steps than it entered that queer brain of his that he might be funking his duty if he didn't walk straight through the evil influences of the house, and defy them. Yah! So he turns round and goes back through the hall; and he leaves the front door unlatched.

"Now, the probable fact is that Ken didn't hear him when he passed the door of the kitchen going towards the outside. And, no sooner had he got to the door at the rear of the house - the one givin' on the yard-then he saw ... well, what?

"We'll never know precisely that; the boy's dead, and Glenda never told McDonnell. It's most probable that he saw `Joseph', in the light of the fire in the window, climbing down from the roof on the window with the gun and silencer in his hand. A silencer, you know, isn't altogether silent; it makes a noise as though you cupped the palms of your hands and brought them together quickly. Now Ted was in a state to see evil spirits; he may even have tried to convince himself that that's what he did see; but it wouldn't quite wash....

"He'd keep quiet, and determine his line. But Glenda saw him in the doorway, and he was marked from that minute. She wasn't sure he'd seen her, but it must have l been a horrible moment.

"In the interval, what has happened? Masters is coming down from upstairs. When he first went up, the wind had moved the front door, and he had closed it on the latch. Well, down he comes again.... and sees the front door open as Ted had left it. Son, if he'd gone in the room where `Joseph' and McDonnell were supposed to have been sitting-well, it would've been all up. But he sees that open door and he charges out like a maniac: to find, of course, no footprints going round the side of the house. He comes round the side of the house as `Joseph,' the work finished, is returning on the other side. He hears Darworth's moans . . . y'know, I don't really believe Darworth knew his confederate had finished him, even then, or he'd have sung out boldly.

"But young Latimer, standin' in the doorway just outside the house, heard Masters come tearin' round the side of the house; he'd heard those moans of Darworth's also. He still ain't sure what they mean - he still ain't sure of anything. But he hears Masters come chargin' round the side of the house, and he realizes that, if there's really been any dirty work, his position might be embarrassin'. He ducked back to the front room, and arrived not a second before Darworth pulled the bell-cord.

"Meantime, Glenda was back. She'd shoved the gun and silencer under a floorboard that she and Darworth had prepared in that room the night before. And McDonnell's description to me of that woman when she came in and faced him - he was laying out cards in that alleged Rummy game - is fairly revealing. He said she was flushed, and her eyes were shining. She rolled up the sleeve of her coat and (to his own stupefaction) very calmly went about her morphine alibi. 'My dear,' she said to him, 'I believe I've made a mistake. I believe I've really killed the after all.' And she smiled.

"Do you wonder he was nearly insane when he rushed out? Masters tells me he never saw a man look like McDonnell when he saw him first after that, holdin' a handful of cards like a crazy man.

"I think you know the rest. The doubtful point was: what would Ted say? You know what he did; he kept quiet, and yelled at you that it really was a ghost-murder after all. It had taken possession of him that a fake ghost-murder was better publicity than a common shooting; and he was still puzzled about it anyway, because you all swore Darworth was murdered with a dagger.... By the way, wasn't that his first question to you? 'With Louis Playge's dagger? With what?' And then he kept quiet until he announced his belief in a supernatural killing.

"The rest of it will always be pure speculation, because the only two people who could tell us how Ted Latimer was lured out to Brixton are both dead. . . . Obviously Glenda had to work very, very rapidly. Ted might change his rather volatile mind at any minute, and decide to talk. One suggestion as to what `Joseph' had been up to, and Glenda might be done for. If necessary, she was prepared to follow that boy home and close his mouth. So she got Masters to send her home---'Joseph' was very sleepy, much more sleepy than the amount of morphine she'd taken would warrant. But she didn't go home”

"And then she got the brilliant idea of her life. You know what it was. `Joseph' had planned to disappear; but what if `Joseph' were supposed to have been murdered? ... The essential thing was for her to get to Ted immediately, and spin some story that would keep his mouth closed until she lured him out to Magnolia Cottage.

"So she waited for him to go home - probably close to Plague Court. The trouble was that, although he was the second witness examined, he refused to go home afterwards; and didn't go until the crowd of them had that row, and broke up.

`But, delayed in that way, Glenda had stayed until the police subordinates themselves had gone; she was working out, even then, the details of that rather neat idea, and, while all you people were engrossed in the kitchen, there was a remarkable opportunity to pinch that dagger.”

"Which is why, d'ye see, she lost Ted at the moment; he'd stalked off in a tearin' rage. But, burn me, that woman would not be beaten. That's the damnable, amazing thing about her. She relied on her wits and her powers of inventiveness to catch him alone, in his own room - in the house where she'd of course been many times as `Joseph' - to catch him when his mind was befogged and his reasonin' not up to par - and convince him that he must meet her next day. If she delayed, if he didn't have something to convince him before the very next morning, he might think better of his resolution to keep quiet. Y'see, the police were suspicious of him; and, under press of suspicion, he'd probably have told what he knew when he came to reflect on it.”

"And what do you think she did tell him?" inquired Halliday.

"God knows. By the note he left for his sister next morning, saying he was `investigating', it seems likely that

Joseph' didn't pretend to him it was a ghost-murder; but said that if he'd come out to Magnolia Cottage he would be furnished with proof. That 'You never suspected it, did you?' seems to indicate, too, that 'Joseph' accused a member of the group; and maintained that he (Joseph) was trying to save Darworth when Ted got that unfortunate look out the back door. After all, when a man's been found stabbed, Joseph mightn't have found it difficult to persuade Ted that Joseph was innocent - because `he' obviously hadn't been in the room of the stabbing. 'A pistol? What nonsense! Your eyes were deceiving you; I was keeping watch over my patron, who was foully murdered by . . . who?' Lady Benning; I'll lay you a fiver that's the one Glenda picked. 'I was at the window; I saw it done.'

"I say, you get your masculines and feminines considerably tangled in talkin' about Joseph or Glenda; but bear with me, lads....

"What was I sayin'? Oh, yes. Now, obviously, considerable care had to be taken in spiriting away Ted. Because why? Because it must never be known that Ted's disappearance had any connection with Magnolia Cottage. If a suspicious body were found unrecognizably burned in the ' furnace, and inquiry showed Ted had been messin' about there, people's suspicious minds might say, 'Hey, look here! Is that body in the furnace really Joseph's?' "And there is where my hat remains suspended over my head in admiration of Glenda. She was canny. She didn't rush Ted out to Brixton and kill him then and there. With her knowledge of the Latimer family, she laid a really remarkable false trail. The very subtle and very neat scheme was delicately to hint that Ted had done a bunk for Scotland. He's got a mother up there; a mother not quite right in the head; if the mother says he didn't come up there, and that she's not shieldin' him, ten to one the police will believe he did and she is. And the purpose? To shift suspicion away from Magnolia Cottage until the body to be found there is accepted as Joseph's; then they can hunt for Ted until they're convinced he's skipped the country - and will believe he's guilty.

"Result - a faked phone-call, not from anywhere near Euston Station - in deliberately vague terms. If the fake Ted said straight out he was going to Edinburgh, it might be discovered too quickly he hadn't; that woman trusted to the way we'd think ... ayagh, but she did! And the ironical part of the business was that McDonnell was taken in by it: he sent a telegram to Ted's mother, and that lady replied to Marion that Ted wasn't there, but she would shield him if he did arrive.

"At five o'clock Glenda, who had been keeping Ted in the background, was ready to go through with the scheme. Mrs. Sweeney was out. . . ."

'By the way," I suggested, "just how does Mrs. Sweeney figure in this business? Did she know what was going on?"

H.M. pinched at his under-lip.

"She'll always say that she didn't. It's like this. She was telling the absolute truth when she said Darworth brought `Joseph' to her. Mrs. Sweeney is a former medium; Masters has looked her up, and has pretty well decided that Darworth saved her from goin' to prison once, - and had a tight hold over her in a good deal the same way as Glenda had over him. He wanted a figurehead for that house in Brixton; between them, he and Joseph scared La Sweeney to death. At first they probably tried to put over on her that 'Joseph' was a boy-but you can't live in a house like that for four years and not get pretty suspicious. She likely became suspicious right off, and Glenda said to her, 'Look here, my friend. You're already mixed up in some very shady business; one word from my friend Roger Darworth, and you'll land in prison. If you should happen to see anything: forget it. Do you understand?' We shan't know the whole truth until Sweeney tells; but, as Glenda's dead now.... You see, Darworth wanted somebody always living in that house in Brixton, for a very good reason, and a woman he held and could hold a threat over would make an admirable housekeeper."

"Do you think she knew Glenda had murdered Ted, and substituted the body?"

"I'm damn certain of it! Otherwise she might have been prevailed on to tell us. Don't you remember what she said: 'I'm afraid!' And, son, she was. I shouldn't be at all surprised if it hadn't been good old Glenda's plan to wait for her to return from her day out, after Ted was disposed of, and eliminate Mrs. Sweeney. Fortunately, she was scared off by that workman looking in at the window; and Sweeney didn't get home until past six...."

Big Ben, loud in the silent streets, struck four. H.M. saw that the last of the punch was cold and his pipe had gone out. Disconsolately he shivered a little in the chill room. He got up, lumbered over to the fire, and stared into it.

"I'm tired. Burn me, I could sleep a week. And I think that's all the story.... I arranged my little show tonight. A friend of mine I referred to as `Shrimp', a good little feller who says he's makin' an honest living now, helped me out. He's an arms expert, and light enough to scale that tree at Plague Court. It was all arranged. I'd had him go over the house, and he found Glenda's gun and silencer under the floor-boards in the room she used at Plague Court. We were goin' to use another, a duplicate, if we couldn't find 'em. At shortly after eleven o'clock Masters and his crowd gravely - without sayin' anything - persuaded Glenda to go to Plague Court. She couldn't refuse; anyway, she came very gamely. First they went into the front room and Masters resurrected the gun from under the floor. She didn't say anything, and neither did Masters. They walked just as gravely out to the back yard. Shrimp took the gun, and, in sight of Glenda, climbed up on the roof of the stone house....

"I wonder what that woman thought when she saw him firin' those bullets? You know what she did. They were fools not to search her beforehand. She might 'a' hurt somebody besides herself."

Stale smoke hung about the lamp. I felt unutterably weary.

"You haven't yet said," Halliday told him harshly, "what you did about McDonnell. `His innocence!' Damned rot! I'll bet he was as guilty as she was.... Look here, you didn't let him get away?"

H.M. stared down into the dying fire. His back jerked a little, and he blinked round uncomprehendingly.

"Let him-? Son, didn't you know?" -

"Know what?"

"No, of course," said H.M. dully. "We didn't stay in that infernal yard you didn't see....”

"Let him get away? Not exactly. I said, `Son, I'm goin' out of this room-' this was when we were at his flat. I said, `You've got a service revolver, haven't you?' And he said, `Yes.' And I said, 'Well, I'm goin' now. If I thought you had a chance to escape hangin', I shouldn't advise it.' And he said, `Thank you.' "

"You mean he shot himself?"

"I thought he was goin' to; the way he looked then.... I said, `You couldn't tell a court what you've told me, could you? It would only look like hidin." Well, he saw that.

"But she must have been an amazin' woman, Glenda. What did that young fool do? He joined the party that arrested Glenda, but he couldn't get close enough for a word, Masters tells me. Masters didn't know about him then. We came out with them to Plague Court. Don't you understand the meanin' of those shots, man? Shrimp had no sooner done his demonstration, and the crowd of 'em were standin' in the yard, than McDonnell walks out in front of 'em with a gun and says, 'There's a taxi around the corner, Glenda. I've had it waiting. Make a bolt for it. I'll hold these chaps till you can make it.' The God blasted young fool! - his last gesture, y'see, cool as ice, holdin' up the whole crowd...."

"Then those two shots-McDonnell fired-?"

"No, son. Glenda looked at him. She took out her own weapon as she got out from Masters' men. She said, `Thanks' to McDonnell. Then she fired two bullets into his head just before she ran.

"She died in the right place, son. She and Louis Playge - they both belong there."

JOHN DICKSON CARR

The man many readers think of as the most British of detective story writers was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania in 1906. After attending Haverford College, Can went to Paris where, his parents hoped, he would continue his education at the Sorbonne. Instead he became a writer. His first novel, It Walks By Night, was published in 1929. Shortly thereafter, Carr married and settled in his wife's native country, England.

The Thirties were a highly prolific period for Carr, who was turning out three to five novels a year. Some of these were published under what became his most famous nom de plume, Carter Dickson.

In 1965 Carr left England and moved to Greenville, South Carolina, where he remained until his death in 1977.

In his lifetime, Carr received the Mystery Writers of America's highest honor, the Grand Master Award, and was one of only two Americans (the other was Patricia Highsmith) ever admitted into the prestigious - but almost exclusively British - Detection Club. In his famous essay "The Grandest Game in the World," Can listed the qualities always present in the detective novel at its best: fair play, sound plot construction, and ingenuity. (He added, "Though this quality of ingenuity is not necessary to the detective story as such, you will never find the great masterpiece without it.") That these qualities are prevalent in Carr's work is obvious to his legions of readers. In the words of the great detective novelist-critic Edmund Crispin, "For subtlety, ingenuity, and atmosphere, he was one of the three or four best detective-story writers since Poe that the English language has known."