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
