The Burning Court

by John Dickson Carr

  She turned the car round, with her own broad style of driving. They went down under the elms and copper beeches, across the Lancaster Highway, and beyond into the gloom where King’s Avenue curved up the hill for half a mile to the gates of the Park. The thought occurred to Stevens that this ought to be Halloween instead of the end of April, for, as they moved away, he could have sworn he heard some one in the street calling his name. But the exhaust of the car was sputtering rather loudly, because Marie had begun to race the engine when they turned round, and he could not be sure. He stuck his head out to look behind, but he did not mention the matter to Marie—especially since the street was empty. She was so completely normal, so delightedly glad to see him, that his notions began to wake self-distrust. He wondered whether over-tiredness could produce such things as he appeared to be seeing and even hearing. Which was nonsense, for he was as strong as an ox, and, Marie sometimes complained, as dense-minded as one.

  “It’s nice, it’s nice,” she was saying. “Don’t you feel the way it’s in the air? There’s a lovely show of crocuses by that big tree out by the fence. You remember? And I noticed some primroses this afternoon. Oh, it’s all lovely!” She breathed deeply, and flexed her muscles, and threw back her head. Then she turned round, smiling. “Tired?”

  “Not a bit.”

  “Sure?”

  “No, I tell you!”

  She looked puzzled. “Ted dear, you needn’t snap my head off. You do need a cocktail. Ted—we’re not going out tonight, are we?”

  “I hope not. Why?”

  Marie kept her eyes fixed intently on the road, frowning a little.

  “Well, Mark Despard has been calling up all evening and asking to speak with you. He wants to see you. He says it’s terribly important, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. Then he made some kind of slip, and I thought it must be about his uncle Miles. He sounded very queer.”

  She turned round on him that same “spiritual” look he knew so well, and which, with her eyes wide open in the flash of a street lamp—staring straight at him—gave to her face a complete sugary loveliness.

  “Ted, whatever it is he wants, you won’t pay any attention to it, will you?”

  III

  “Does he?” said Stevens, mechanically. “You know I won’t go out if I can help it. It depends on whether he’s… really got something on his mind, or——”

  He stopped, because he did not know what he meant himself. There were times when Marie’s expression retreated from him; he touched fog. That look had doubtless been an illusion of light from the street lamp. For she dismissed the matter of Mark Despard from her mind, and went on talking about some slip-covers she was having made for the living-room furniture in the New York apartment. After he had had a cocktail, he thought, he would bring the matter up, and make a joke of it; and then they could forget it.

  He tried to remember whether she had read any of Cross’s books. She might have seen the manuscripts, since she did a great deal of reading for him. Her own reading had apparently been surprisingly large, though sketchy: it was concerned mostly with details of places and people. He glanced at her, and saw that the sleeve of her coat had fallen back. On her left wrist she wore the bracelet—it was a wrought bracelet, having a clasp like a cat’s head with a ruby in the mouth—which he had seen in that accursed photograph.

  “By the way,” he said, “did you ever meet up with any of Cross’s work?”

  “Cross? Who’s that?”

  “He writes those accounts of murder cases.”

  “Oh! That! No; but then I haven’t got a morbid mind like some people.” She seemed to grow serious. “You know, I’ve often thought that you—you and Mark Despard and Dr. Welden—being interested in those murders and ugly things—don’t you think it’s a little unhealthy?”

  Stevens was flabbergasted. Even in what he called her Elsie-Dinsmore moods, he had never heard her talk quite like this; it struck a wrong note; it was all wrong. He looked at her again, and saw that the plump face was quite serious.

  “It has been stated by a high authority,” he said, “that, so long as the American people preserve their wholesome interest in murder and adultery, the country’s safe. And if you should happen to feel morbid”—he tapped the briefcase—“here’s Cross’s new one. It’s a book of women poisoners. I believe there’s a ‘Marie’ in it, too.”

  “Oh? Have you read it?”

  “Just glanced into it.”

  She showed not even any mild curiosity; she dismissed the matter with a frown of concentration as she maneuvered the car into the drive beside their house. He got out, feeling suddenly very hungry and very tired. The frame cottage, built after the New England fashion, and painted white with green shutters, was cheerful with lights through fresh curtains. There was a smell of new grass and lilac; a hill of trees tumbled away behind it, and up the hill, a hundred yards or so, the great wall of Despard Park ran at the end of the avenue which had been named for King Charles the Second.

  Inside the house, he would have liked to sit down in a chair and stay there. To the right of the hall was the living-room: with the sofa and deep chairs covered in some reddish-orange material, the fat-bowled lamps on the tables, the shelves of bright-jacketed books let into white panelling, the one good copy of the Rembrandt over the fireplace—even the cocktail-shaker, which has become a part of our lares and penates—in short, typical of a hundred thousand homes. Through the glass doors to the dining-room across the hall he could see fat Ellen creaking about, setting the table.

  Marie, taking his hat and briefcase, shooed him upstairs to wash. Which was better. He came downstairs, whistling; but he stopped before he got to the lowest step. He could see his briefcase lying on the telephone table in the hall, the silvered catch gleaming; and the catch was unfastened.

  The worst of this was feeling like a conspirator in your own house. He hated this fog; he liked to have things out in the open. Feeling as guilty as it was possible to feel, he went over to the telephone table and made a hurried examination of the manuscript inside.

  The photograph of Marie D’Aubray was missing; and that was that.

  Refusing to give himself time to think, he went hastily into the living-room. It occurred to him that the atmosphere had subtly altered. On the sofa, lounged back easily against it, Marie sat by the cocktail-table with an empty glass in her hand. Her face was flushed, and she pointed to another glass on the table.

  “You’ve been an awfully long time,” she said. “Drink that. You’ll feel better.”

  While he drank, it occurred to him that she was watching him. The thought which flashed through his head was so ugly that, in irritation at it and defiance of it, he poured out another cocktail and drank again. Then he put down the glass with great care.

  “By the way, Marie,” he said, “there’s a little mix-up here. Number 1 King’s Avenue has suddenly become a house of mystery. I should not be surprised to see clutching hands coming through the curtains and bodies falling out of cupboards. Tell me, do you know of anybody, having the same name as yours, who was in the habit of poisoning people with arsenic a dog’s years ago?”

  She stared at him, with a pucker of concentration. “Ted, what on earth are you talking about? You’ve seemed queer ever since you got home.” She hesitated, and laughed. “Do you think I’ve poisoned your cocktail?”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t put it past you. But seriously, wild as it sounds, did you ever hear of anybody—it must have been nearly a hundred years ago—anybody who was your exact double to the life, and even wore a bracelet like that cat’s-head one of yours?”

  “Ted, what on earth are you talking about?”

  He dropped his light tone. “Listen, Marie. Let’s not make a mystery of it. The thing isn’t important, and it’s not worth it. The point is, somebody might think it was a good joke to have your photograph, in eighteen-fifties costume, put into a book as the authentic portrait of a woman who must have murdered half the neighborhood, to judge by
what happened to her. But nobody’s going to swallow it. Cross has been accused by hoaxes already; you remember that fuss Ladbourne kicked up in the World? This will seem too much of a hoax. Frankly, now: who was this Marie D’Aubray? Was she a relation of yours?”

  Marie had got up. She did not seem angry, or startled; she looked at him with a sort of breathless half-bewilderment and solicitude. Then she stood back primly. He had never noticed before how oddly she could change color, as though with amusement, or the little wrinkle along the side of her neck.

  “Ted,” she said, “I’ll try to be serious, because you seem to be. There is somebody named Marie D’Aubray (the name’s pretty common, you know), who killed people umpty-umph years ago. And you think that I’m her, or she’s me. And so you play the Grand Inquisitor. If I’m that Marie D’Aubray”—she stole a glance at herself, over her shoulder, at a wall mirror behind, and for a second he thought there must be something wrong with the mirror—“if I’m that Marie D’Aubray, you can testify that in the more important respects I’ve worn terribly well, haven’t I?”

  “I didn’t say that. I asked whether you might be remotely descended from——”

  “Remotely descended from! Give me a cigarette. Pour me out another cocktail. Bosh, darling. Get along with you.”

  Stevens drew a deep breath. He sat back and studied her.

  “I’ve got to award you the prize,” he admitted, “for your ability to put everybody else in the wrong. All right, my wench, I don’t mind. Have it your own way. The only thing is, a respectable publishing-house can’t lift photographs out of authors’ manuscripts and keep ’em. … Look here now, Marie. Man to man, didn’t you open my briefcase a few minutes ago?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t open it and take out a photograph of Marie D’Aubray, who was guillotined for murder in 1861?”

  Her own temper was beginning to flare. “I most certainly did not!” Then her voice broke. “Oh, Ted, what is all this nonsense?”

  “Well, somebody took it, because it’s not there. There’s no body else in the house except Ellen. Unless a sinister China-man sneaked in and stole it while I was upstairs washing, I don’t see how it can have got away. Cross’s address is on the title page of the manuscript. I’ve been wondering whether I ought to telephone him and ask him if he’d mind suppressing that picture; but we can’t have the damned thing stolen——”

  The stolid Ellen poked her head in at the door. “Dinner’s ready, Miz Stevens,” she said, with great cheerfulness. And at the same time, out in the hall, the knocker on the front door rapped sharply.

  There is nothing very strange or startling about a rapping on the knocker; it may happen a dozen times a day; but for two or three seconds Stevens could not move. He sat on the sofa, looking out sideways through the arch into the hall, at the porcelain umbrella-stand in one corner. He heard Ellen mutter disgustedly, and then he heard Ellen’s creaking shoes moving towards the front door, and the scrape of the lock.

  “Mr. Stevens in?” asked Mark Despard’s voice.

  Stevens got up. Marie was standing there expressionless, and as he passed her Stevens (from a cloudy motive he could not analyze) lifted her hand and put it to his lips. Then he was out in the hall, greeting Mark with jovial heartiness, saying that they were about to sit down to dinner, and wouldn’t Mark have a cocktail?

  Mark Despard stood just inside the door, and there was another man—a stranger—behind him. The light of the bronze lantern in the hall shone on Mark’s clean, hook-nosed face, sensitive despite the strong jaw and bony powerful figure; on the very quick, very light blue eyes which moved round the hall. He had wiry sandy eyebrows, meeting in the middle, and wiry sandy hair. Mark was a young lawyer, with an office in Chestnut Street he had inherited from his father, who had died only half a dozen years before. Mark’s practice was small, because he was too much of a theorist: he said it was because he was cursed with the ability to see two sides to everything. While he moved round Despard Park, which was the thing he loved most, he liked to wear a sort of squire-cum-gamekeeper costume: shooting-coat and flannel shirt, corduroy breeches with laced boots. He stood looking round the hall, turning his hat round in spatulate fingers, a musician’s fingers; his voice was polite, apologetic, and resolute.

  “Sorry to break in like this,” he said. “But you know I wouldn’t do it if it weren’t important, and I’m afraid it can’t wait. Er——”

  He turned round to the man behind him, who had stepped inside the door. This was a shorter, burlier man with an air as courteous though rather defensive. He had a blue-chinned, strong-featured face, a good face despite the fact that the strong features were being padded out with quiet, unobtrusive drinking; there was a V between his heavy brown eyes, but his mouth was pleasant. Even in the way he wore his heavy topcoat there was a curious air of distinction; you would remember him.

  “This,” went on Mark, “is a very old friend of mine, Doctor—Mr. Partington.” He corrected himself quickly; Partington’s expression did not change. “We’d like to have a word with you in private, Ted. It may be a rather long word, but I thought if you knew it was in a good cause you wouldn’t mind postponing…”

  “Hello, Mark!” said Marie from the archway, with her usual smile. “Back to your study, Ted; and all of you. There’s plenty of time for dinner.”

  After the introductions Stevens led them rather hurriedly back to his own room, down a couple of steps at the end of the hall. It was a small room, and the three of them seemed to fill it. He turned on the hanging lamp over the typewriter-desk, which gave the place a cold, murky look. Mark shut the door carefully and stood against it.

  “Ted,” he said, “my uncle Miles was murdered.”

  Stevens had been expecting it. He was not nervous, but still he felt as though his insides were shaking. And it was the baldness of the words, the sudden stripping-off, which gave him a genuine start.

  “My God! Mark…”

  “He was poisoned with arsenic.”

  “Sit down,” said Stevens, after a pause. He indicated two leather chairs in the cramped room among the books, and backed into his own at the desk. Sitting with his back to the desk, his arms stretched out along it, he looked at them. “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know, except that it was somebody at our house,” answered Mark in the same heavy voice. He drew a deep breath. “Now that I’ve got that off my chest, I can tell you why I tell you.”

  He was sitting forward, his long arms hanging down between his knees, his light-blue eyes fixed on the hanging lamp.

  “There’s something I must do and that I want to do. To do it, I shall need three people besides myself; I’ve got two of them, and you’re the only other person I can trust. But if you decide to help us, one thing you must promise. Whatever we discover in that old man’s body, no word of it must ever reach the police.”

  Stevens looked down at the carpet to hide the uncertainties of his own thoughts. “You don’t want the—whoever-it-is, punished?”

  “Punished? Oh yes,” said Mark, nodding with the air of a cool fanatic. “But you don’t understand. We live in a queer civilization, Ted. If I have a rage, it is a rage for minding my own business and having other people mind theirs. If there is one thing I hate, it is the word publicity. I mean personal publicity. To our American mind it has become a god and a mania and a wielder of destinies. There probably never was a more damnable doctrine than, ‘I don’t care what you say about me; just mention my name’—because it really has come to mean that a man’s achievements for good (or bad) are measured by the same thing that could be said about him in the telephone directory. It’s not the newspapers’ fault; they can’t help it, any more than a mirror can help who insists on looking into it. And it’s all fair enough if it’s only for vanity. But this is different. Murder or no murder, I’m not going to have our private affairs put up as a greasy heart-throb for readers to whom I wouldn’t even bother to tell the time of day. That, you see, is how I feel
. That’s why no word of it must ever come out.

  “Tonight, if you will help us, we are going to open the crypt, open my uncle’s coffin, and open his body. We must have definite proof whether or not there is arsenic in it, though I’m quite certain already. Let me tell you as much as I know myself:

  “I’ve known for well over a week that he must have been murdered. But I couldn’t do anything. In order to make certain, the body would have to be opened and a post-mortem performed. The question was how to do that in secret. No doctor would—that is——”

  Partington spoke pleasantly.

  “What Mark means,” he said, “is that no reputable doctor would perform such a post-mortem. So he had to send for me.”

  “I didn’t mean that!”

  “I know you didn’t, old man.” Partington looked at Stevens, and drummed on his hard hat. “You had better understand my position in this business. I am Mark’s oldest friend, and ten years ago I was engaged to marry his sister Edith. I was a surgeon; ten years ago I had a very fair practice in New York. I performed an abortion; never mind why; I thought the reason was good; but there was some hysteria afterwards, and I was found out.” He seemed to take pleasure in prodding himself with these details, though there was no bitterness in the way he smiled. “It must have been a dull season, for Mark’s newspaper friends made the most of it. I was struck off the register, of course. That didn’t matter greatly; I had saved my money. Also, Edith always believed that the woman on whom I had performed the abortion was… which is all ancient history,” concluded Partington, staring across at the door, his forehead wrinkled, and rubbing his blue chin. His throat had grown dry with the uttering of even so few words. Stevens saw why, and he got up and took a bottle of whisky out of the cupboard. “Since then,” Partington said, “I’ve been living in England and I’ve been very comfortable. But over a week ago Mark cabled me—he said he couldn’t do anything until I got here—and I took the first boat. Now you know as much as I do.”