John Carr: The Plague Court Murders

"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...:'