The Burning Court

by John Dickson Carr

  Thus she stood while Mark read the telegram again.

  “This is a hoax of some kind,” said Stevens. “That telegram’s a fake. No police officer would send a nice courteous message like that, inviting you to come home like a family lawyer. He’d phone New York and have them see you.—Mark, there’s something damned fishy about this.”

  “You’re telling me,” said Mark, explosively. He took a few steps up and down the room. “Yes; whoever sent that telegram, it wasn’t a cop. Let’s see. Handed in at a Western Union office in Market Street at 7:35. That doesn’t tell us much. …”

  “But what is wrong?” cried Lucy. “The crypt’s open. Aren’t they here? Aren’t—” She looked over Mark’s shoulder, and stopped. “Tom Partington!” she said, blankly.

  “Hello, Lucy,” said Partington, with ease. He moved forward from the mantelpiece, and she mechanically gave him her hand. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”

  “It has, Tom. But what on earth are you doing here? I thought you were in England. You haven’t changed much. Yes, you have—a little.”

  Partington made the customary remarks. It appeared that Lucy and Mark had not been married at the time he went away. “Only a flying visit,” he explained. “I got in this afternoon. I thought, after ten years, you wouldn’t mind putting me up for a couple of days. …”

  “No, of course not! We’re—” Again mechanically, Lucy glanced over her shoulder as though wondering how to deal with something. They all heard the footsteps now, and Edith came in.

  Edith had more of a glitter about her, although at the same time she carried herself more consciously. It was not that she had grown stiff or at all fussy when only a year or more into her thirties; it was only that you were never quite so certain of her, or the movements of her mind, as you were with Lucy; and Stevens did not like to think what she might be in twenty years’ time. She was taller than Lucy, and more slender in a thin-boned fashion. She had the family carriage, the family looks—the brown hair, the blue eyes, the air of brushing things aside as Mark did—and she was very good-looking, though inclined to become a trifle hollow round the eyes. It was noticeable that Henderson, as soon as she came in, backed away and began to assume a guilty look. Yet Stevens had often had a curious impression that she somehow concealed more weakness than her decisive actions would indicate. She wore a fur coat, and no hat; she was dressed (how could you describe it?) fluently. And when she saw Partington she stopped, but her expression did not change.

  “Edith,” said Lucy, hurriedly opening and shutting the catch of her handbag, “they say there’s nothing wrong. They say that telegram’s a fake and there are no police here at all.”

  But Edith was looking at Partington, and she smiled at him.

  “This time,” she announced, in a pleasant voice, “I can honestly say that one of my premonitions has come true. You do bring trouble with you, don’t you?”

  And she extended her left hand. Then she looked round the group.

  “You’ve all been entrusted with the secret,” she said. “Well, Mark, what is it? Lucy and I have been horribly worried, and we may as well know.”

  “It’s a joke, I tell you. That telegram——”

  “Mark,” she said, “was Uncle Miles poisoned?”

  A pause. “Poisoned? Good God, no! What put that idea into your head?” Mark looked at her face, which was more composed than Lucy’s, but she was under no less a strain. And then Mark’s nimble brain hit on a fairly shrewd lie, to be used on the spur of the moment. He put his arm round Lucy, patting her on the back, and then turned again to Edith with a deprecating air. “You’ll know it sooner or later, so you might as well know now. It’s no real trouble, no foolish business like murder. … Where did you get the idea, I wonder?… and nothing to concern the police. But it’s not pleasant. Somebody has a taste for sending fake telegrams—and letters. I got a letter, too—anonymous. It said that Uncle Miles’s body had been stolen out of the crypt.” Evidently aware that this lie sounded thin, he went on hurriedly: “I mightn’t have paid much attention to it if Henderson hadn’t noticed a few queer things. We decided to open the crypt and see. And I’m sorry to tell you, Edith, it’s true. The body’s gone.”

  If anything, Edith seemed more nervous than before. She did not appear to doubt him, but it was clear that the news gave no reassurance.

  “Gone?” she repeated. “But how could it—why—I mean…?”

  Partington interposed smoothly, taking up the cue.

  “Yes, it’s a bad business,” he said, “but it’s not new, though I don’t believe the racket has been tried in America for over fifty years. Did you ever hear, Edith, of the Stewart case in 1878? The body of the millionaire was stolen out of his tomb and held for ransom. The same thing happened at Dunecht; they burgled a crypt there, very much like this one. It’s something our modern racketeers don’t seem to have thought of.”

  “But that’s horrible!” cried Lucy. “Kidnapping a dead body—for ransom?”

  “Mrs. Stewart offered twenty-five thousand dollars to get it back.” Partington was speaking easily, fixing their minds, turning them away as though he led them by the hand. “In the Dunecht case, they caught one of the gang and found the body. The trial was peculiar because there were no precedents in law. Every case of body-snatching recorded up to that time had been for the purpose of selling the body to a medical school; but this was different. I believe the man got five years. … In this case, I suppose they’ve got it into their heads that you are a family who want to keep the old crusted vault intact, and that you’ll pay through the nose to get your uncle’s body back again.”

  Lucy drew a deep breath, disengaged Mark’s arm, and leaned on the table.

  “Well, at least it’s better than—you know—the other thing. Yes, and I’ll admit it: it’s a relief. Edith, you had me horribly scared.” She laughed at herself, for her evident feeling of relief had her almost on the point of tears. “Of course we’ll have to tell the police now, but——”

  “We’ll do nothing of the kind. Do you think,” said Mark, “that I want poor old Miles’s body knocked around now like a dead fox with a pack of hounds on it? Yah! Not likely. If body-snatchers have taken it, as Part says, then I’m willing to pay to avoid a rumpus. Now cheer up, both of you.”

  “I might as well tell you,” said Edith, very gently, “that I don’t believe one word of it.”

  Was there such a thing, Stevens wondered, as a handsome hag? The term was over-strong to a ludicrous extent, for hag would be the last word you might apply to Edith; but it conveyed the idea of a handsome woman whose doubts shadowed her face in that fashion.

  “You don’t?” said Mark. “You don’t still have those hallucinations about poison, do you?”

  “Please come up to the house,” Edith urged. She looked at Henderson. “Joe, it’s very cold up there. Will you make up a fire in the furnace?”

  “Yes’m. Right away,” said Henderson, meekly.

  “It’s getting late,” began Stevens, “and if you’ll excuse me——”

  Edith turned quickly. “No! You must come along, Ted; you must. We must thrash it out, all of us; Mark, make him come along. Don’t you see there’s something wicked, really wicked in this? Whoever sent that telegram is playing with us and laughing at us; it’s no gangsters who want to steal a body for money. Why should anyone send a telegram like that? I’ve had a feeling something like this was going to happen, ever since—” She stopped, and looked out again to where the two lanterns were burning, and shivered.

  It was a quiet group which went up the path. Partington tried to talk to Edith; but, although there was no outward constraint between them, there was a wall between, nevertheless. Lucy alone seemed inclined to treat the matter as no very deadly thing; as unpleasant and even terrible, but as nothing that need throw the world out of focus. “Whoever sent that telegram is playing with us and laughing at us”—these were the words of which Stevens kept thinking.

 
They went into the house, and through the big hall to the library at the front. It was the wrong sort of room to have chosen for such a conference; it put the past, and the odors of the past, too much in the midst of them. The library was very long and broad, but not very high, with a raftered ceiling. The walls had been plastered over and calcimined a dull green, to freshen it up with modernness; but the original room broke out in odd nooks and corners, including the fireplace. Edith sat down in an overstuffed chair by a bright lamp, with the shuttered windows for a background. To the rarefied modern taste which sees beauty in the present style of decoration, it would also have seemed cluttered with odds and ends gathered by Miles or Mark from travels in far places: but the gusty seventeenth-century, with its fondness for toys and gauds, would have felt at home in it.

  “Listen, Edith,” urged Lucy, “must you bring all this up? I don’t like the way you’re going on; I didn’t like what you were saying, coming out in the train. Can’t we just forget it, and——”

  “Well, we can’t,” said Edith, shortly. “You know as well as I do the rumor is all over the place that there’s something wrong here.”

  Mark whistled. “Rumor?”

  “And if you ask me who started it,” said Edith, “I should say it was Margaret… oh, unintentionally, I admit. Something just—slipped. She may have heard the nurse talking to me, or the nurse to the doctor. Don’t look so surprised, Mark. Did you know that that nurse was suspicious of us all the time she was here, and that’s why she kept her room locked up whenever she wasn’t in it?”

  Mark whistled again. He glanced uneasily at Partington and Stevens. “Deeps,” he said, “within deeps. Or wheels, or—Everybody seems to be keeping back something. Suspicious of us? Why?”

  “Because,” answered Edith, “some one stole something out of her room.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep dribbling out bits of information.” Mark spoke rather irritably, after a silence. “You always used to speak out hot and strong. Stole what? When? Why?”

  “It was the week-end before Uncle Miles died—the Saturday. I think it was the 8th.” She looked at Stevens. “You remember, Ted? You and Marie were up here to play bridge; only Mark broke up the whole affair, and for some reason it degenerated into telling ghost stories?”

  “I remember,” said Lucy. She was trying to disguise her uneasiness with a pleased expression. “Mark had taken one too many highballs, that was the reason. But why do you say ‘degenerated’ into telling ghost stories? It was good fun.”

  Edith went on: “The next morning Miss Corbett came to me and said she seemed to have mislaid something. I thought she talked a little snappishly, and asked what it was. She became more definite. She asked me whether anyone had accidentally taken something from her room; something the doctor had ordered for Miles in such-and-such an event (she didn’t specify what). She described it as a small square bottle. Finally, she added that it could be of no use to anybody, that it was a deadly poison if given in quantity, and that if somebody had taken it in mistake for smelling-salts—which she thought wasn’t very likely—it would be a kindness to return it. Just like that. I don’t think she was suspicious, exactly. She thought somebody had been monkeying about.”

  Mark almost slipped. Stevens saw that it was on the tip of his tongue to say, “But they wouldn’t keep arsenic for a medicinal purpose”; he opened his mouth, but shut it in time. Mark looked at Partington in a puzzled way, and then back to Lucy. “Did you hear anything of this, Lucy?”

  “No.” She was troubled. “But that’s not surprising, is it? I mean, they naturally go to Edith rather than me; anybody would. If I were somebody else, I shouldn’t go to me—if you understand.”

  Mark stared round.

  “But damn it all, somebody must have—” He stopped. “What did you say to Miss Corbett, Edith? What did you do?”

  “I said I’d make enquiries.”

  “And did you?”

  “No.” The weakness, the doubt, the indecision, came back to Edith’s practical face; she would run up to the breach, clanging arms, but she always hesitated there. “I suppose I was… afraid. Oh, I know it sounds silly, but I was. I don’t mean I didn’t say anything; I threw out enquiries, in a casual way, as though I were talking about a bottle of Uncle Miles’s medicine; and nobody connected the two. I didn’t mention poison. I couldn’t.”

  “This is a devil of a mess,” said Mark, “but it couldn’t have been ar… h’m. Here, Part, this is a job for you. What sort of stuff could it have been?”

  Partington frowned. “Depends on the doctor’s ideas as to possible developments in the case; I haven’t heard his own complete diagnosis. But it might have been several things. Just a minute! Tell me, Edith, did the nurse report this to the doctor?”

  “Doctor Baker? Yes, of course. So, naturally, I didn’t think——”

  “And Doctor Baker had no hesitation about saying your uncle died of gastro-enteritis? He had no suspicion, in other words?”

  “None at all!”

  “Then,” said Partington, curtly, “stop worrying. You can take it from me that it couldn’t have been any medical preparation which could possibly have caused the same symptoms as your uncle died with—like antimony, for instance. Isn’t that obvious? Otherwise both the doctor and the nurse would have been on to it immediately. … No; probably it was a sedative, or else a heart-stimulant like digitalin or strychnine. Those things can be deadly, as you know; but all of them are what are called neurotic poisons; and—again take it from me—not one of them could have caused the symptoms with which your uncle died. Far from it! So what are you worrying about?”

  “I know,” murmured Edith, miserably, and scratched her nails up and down the arm of the chair. “I know that, I told myself that all the time, and I knew it couldn’t be. Nobody would do a thing like that!” She smiled, or tried to. “But with Miss Corbett locking her door every time she went out of her room afterwards, and even locking it on the night Miles died, after the little bottle had been returned…”

  “Returned?” said Mark, quickly. “Yes; that’s what I was going to ask you. What happened to the bottle? Baker didn’t just let it float round the house, and laugh ha-ha, did he? You say it was returned?”

  “Yes. Evidently on the Sunday night. It was gone only twenty-four hours, you see, so there wasn’t time for a real fuss or hue-and-cry. Yes, it was the Sunday night; I remember because Marie had just been up to say hello and good-bye, that she and Ted were driving to New York next morning. I went out of my room about nine o’clock, and met Miss Corbett in the upstairs hall. She said: ‘Thank some one for me; the bottle has been returned. Some one put it on the table outside Mr. Despard’s, meaning Miles’s, door.’ I said, ‘Is everything all right?’ She said, ‘Yes, everything seems all right.’”

  “Then I see it,” declared Mark. “It means that Miles himself stole them.”

  “Miles himself?” repeated Edith, blankly.

  “Exactly,” said Mark, afire with a new idea. “Now tell me, Part, could that bottle have contained morphia tablets?”

  “Yes, certainly. You say he had been in considerable pain, and wasn’t sleeping well.”

  “And you remember,” cried Mark, turning on the others and pointing his finger, “that Uncle Miles was always wanting more morphia than the doctor would give him, when he had the pains? Right! Now suppose Miles stole the bottle out of the nurse’s room, lifted a few tablets—and returned it? Here, wait a minute! On the night he died he called out for somebody to go down to the bathroom and get the ‘tablets that would ease pain,’ didn’t he? Suppose those were the stolen morphia tablets, which he put into the medicine-chest in the bathroom so the nurse wouldn’t find them in his own room?”

  “No, that won’t work,” said Lucy. “There were no morphia tablets there. Those were only the ordinary veronal tablets we keep there all the time.”

  “All right; but does the other part of it sound reasonable?”

  “Yes, it’s
entirely possible,” agreed Partington.

  “What is the matter with all of you?” asked Edith. She spoke in a calm tone; but then, unexpectedly, her voice went up almost to a scream. “Don’t you see what is happening? The first thing you tell me is that Uncle Miles’s body has been stolen. Stolen!—taken out of that vault and maybe chopped up or heaven knows what; and that’s the least, the easiest thing, that could have happened. Yet you all take it very calmly, and try to hoodwink me with gentle talk. Oh yes, you do. I know it. Even you do, Lucy. I won’t stand it. I want to know what’s going on, because I know it’s something horrible. I’ve been through too much in the last two weeks. Tom Partington, why do you want to come back and torture me? All we need now is Ogden making jokes, and it would be complete, wouldn’t it? I tell you I won’t stand it.”

  Her hands were shaking, and so was her neck: it was the handsome hag come back again, fluttering on the edge of tears in the big chair. Lucy was regarding her with steadily shining brown eyes: Stevens noted the steady shining of that look, as of a sympathy too great to be expressed. Mark lumbered over and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “You’ll be all right, old girl,” he said, gently. “You need one of those veronal tablets yourself; and a lot of sleep; that’s all. Why not go upstairs with Lucy, and she’ll give you one. You trust to us—whatever has happened, we’ll handle it. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes, I know it,” Edith replied, after a silence. “It was silly of me to fly up like that; but, really, I feel better for it. You can’t help the thoughts that come sometimes.” (An echo of Mark himself.) “I know I shouldn’t lay any foolish claim to being psychic, although a gipsy woman once told me I was; but, Lucy, I knew it was unlucky of you to make a copy of that dress in the picture, and wear it. It’s always been considered unlucky. I know we’re supposed to have outgrown all that, and yet I shouldn’t like to go through the world balancing common sense like a pail of water on my head, and not dare to bend my back or turn my head in case the pail should spill. Still, it’s a plain scientific fact, isn’t it, that the changes of the moon have a direct bearing on certain types of human brain?”