that slight plateau of which the house was the center. 'Then I tumbled to it. That tree is where our good friend Louis Playge rests six feet under. I suppose they didn't want to disturb him. Funny, about superstitions. . . .'
Masters had strode out over the unmarked ground and reached up to test the tree. He was so irritated that his yank splintered off a branch altogether.
'Yes. It's funny, right enough. Ah, bloody lot of good you are, Bert!' He ripped off the branch and flung it on the ground; then his voice rose querulously: 'Stow it, will you, or I'll heave this thing at you! This chap's been murdered. We've got to find out how, and if you keep on gibbering about superstitions-' 'I admit it isn't much good for telling us how the murderer reached the house. But, on the other hand, I thought maybe--'
Masters said, 'Bah,' and turned to me. 'There's got to be some way, you know,' he insisted with a sort of dull persuasiveness. 'Look here, can we be sure there weren't any footprints going out towards the place before we came? There's a terrible mess, you know, now, going up to the door.... 'We can,' I said with conviction.
He nodded. In silence we came round again to the front. The house kept its secret. In that drugged hour of the morning, it was as though we were not three practical men out of a sharp-eyed age; but that the old house had been recreated again, and that, if we looked over the boundary wall, we should see the doors of houses painted with a red cross below the words, 'Lord, have mercy upon us.' When Masters wormed his way through the shattered doorway into the gloom of the place, my thick head could only picture what he might see inside.
I tried to shake off these fancies as McDonnell and I stood outside, the smoke of our breath going up in the still air.
McDonnell said: 'I don't think I shall get a look-in on this business. I'm district, you know; Vine Street; and the Yard will probably handle it. Still....' He whirled round. 'Hullo! I say, sir, what's up?'
There had been a sound of thrashing about inside. It so fitted in with my distorted fancies that for a moment I did not look. Masters was breathing hard, and the beam of his flashlight darted about. The next instant he was in the doorway, very quiet.
He said: 'It's a rum thing, but you know how you get a verse or a jingle or something stuck in your head, so that you can't get it out? - and you keep on repeating it all day, and try to stop yourself, but a little while later you forget, and you find yourself saying it again? Eh? Just so. Well-'
I said: 'Stop babbling, and tell us '
'Ah. Yes.' His head moved round heavily. 'What I've been repeating to myself-don't know why; sort of consolation, maybe; repeating all night to myself-`Last straw that broke the camel's back.' Just like that. Over and over.
'Last straw that broke the camel's back.' By God, somebody'll pay for this!' he snapped, and brought his fist down on the iron bar. 'Yes, you've guessed it. Wait for the newspapers, now. `Spare man with his back turned.. . Somebody's got that dagger again, that's what! It's not here. It's pinched - gone.... D'you think they want to use it again?'
He looked rather wildly from one to the other of us.
Nobody said anything for a full minute. Suddenly McDonnell started to laugh, but it was a sort of laughter exactly like Masters' mood.
'There goes my job,' said McDonnell.
Then he walked away in silence, away from the place that had the look of a ballroom the morning after a party. There were pinkish hints in the sky now, and the dome of St. Paul's was looming out purple-gray against thin shreds of light. Masters kicked a tin can out of his way. A motor horn hooted raucously in Newgate Street, and the milk-carts were already bumping down below the gilt figure of Justice on the cupola of the Old Bailey.
XIII
MEMORIES IN WHITEHALL
IT WAS past six o'clock when I got back to my flat, and two o'clock in the afternoon before I was roused out of loggish slumber by somebody drawing the curtains and talking about breakfast.
That I had become in some measure a celebrity was evident from the presence of Popkins, autocrat of the Edwardian House's domestic staff. He stood at the foot of my bed, all chin and buttons like a Prussian junior-officer, with several newspapers under his arm. He did not comment on these newspapers, seeming to imply that they were not there at all when he insinuated them into my hands; but he was very careful about how I wanted my eggs, bacon, and bath.
Anybody who was in England at the time will remember the terrific, the enormous and ghoulish splash that was caused by 'The Plague Court Horror.' At the Press Club I have been informed that from a newspaper point of view this compound of murder, mystery, the supernatural, and a strong dash of sex, missed not a single element in Fleet Street's recipe for the ideal dish. More, it promised, bitter controversy for some time to come. Tabloid newspapers, in the American style, were not then so common as they are now, but a tabloid was first on the sheaf of papers Popkins gave me. Although the story had broken too late for the early editions, beyond brief glare in Stop-Press, the noon editions broke their front pages open with a double column of leaded type.
Sitting up in bed, on a gray drizzly morning with the electric light turned on, I read all the papers and tried to realize that this was real. And it was difficult. There was the prosaic sound of water running for my bath; watch, keys, and money laid out on the bureau as usual; the noise of cars bumping down the narrow hill of Bury Street, and the rain.
Pictures occupied the entire first page, which was headed: PHANTOM KILLER STILL HAUNTS PLAGUE COURT!
In an oval round the center-piece were ranged photographs of everybody (obviously old ones from the Morgue). One of those faces, which was set in a murderous leer, I recognized as my own. Lady Benning looked shy and virginal in a whalebone collar and cartwheel hat; Major Featherton's, in full army regalia, was a curious half- picture which made him look as though he were holding up and admiring a bottle of beer; Halliday was pictured as incautiously descending some steps with his head turned sideways and his foot poised in the air; Marion's alone was a passable likeness. There was no picture of Darworth, but inside the oval the artist had spread himself on a lively sketch intended to represent his murder at the hand of a hooded phantom with a knife.
Somebody had obviously been indiscreet. Scotland Yard can muzzle the press tolerably well; and there had been an error somewhere, unless - it suddenly occurred to me - Masters wanted to accentuate the supernatural side of the business for reasons of his own. The stories were all reasonably accurate so far as they went, though there was no hint of suspicion towards any of our group.
Curiously enough, these wild speculations about the supernatural tended to diminish rather than accentuate in my own mind the very suggestions they made. In the clear-headed morning after, away from the echoes and dampness of Plague Court, one fact became apparent. Whatever others might believe, nobody who had been in the house at the time could doubt that we faced nothing more than either a very lucky or a very brilliant murderer, who could be hanged like anybody else. But that in itself might be problem enough.
When I was still mulling it over after breakfast, the house-phone rang and they told me that Major Featherton was downstairs. Then I remembered his promise of last night.
Major Featherton was annoyed. Despite the rain, he was tightened into morning-dress, with a silk hat and a rather startling tie; his shaven jowls were waxy with grooming, but his eyes looked puffy. The aroma of shaving- soap was strong. On my writing-table, as he planked down his hat, he caught sight of the tabloid with his bottle- of-beer picture; and he exploded. Evidently it was familiar. He said things about lawsuits; he drew comparisons between reporters and hyenas, stressing the more exalted moral character of the latter; and he was full of wild references to something that had just happened 'at the Rag.' I gathered that there had been certain observations at the Army and Navy Club, together with some talk of presenting him with a tambourine for his next seance. It also appeared that a facetious brigadier had come up behind him and hissed, 'Guinness is good for you.'
I offered him a cup of coffee, which he refused, and a brandy and soda, which he accepted.
'I was salutin' the flag, dammit!' snorted Major Featherton, when he had been pushed into a chair with a consoling cigar lighted. 'Now, confound it, I won't be able to show my face anywhere; all because I tried to oblige Anne. A mess. Devil of a mess, that's what it is. Now I don't even know whether I ought to go through with what I came to ask you about. Be in for a confounding ragging from....' He paused, and sipped his drink. He brooded. 'I phoned Anne this morning. She was snappish last night; wouldn't let me take her home. But she didn't take my head off this morning, because the poor old girl's upset. I gather Marion Latimer had phoned her before I did; called her an old trouble-maker; and practically said straight out, both for herself and young Halliday, that the less they saw of her in the future the better they'd both like it. However-!'
