The Burning Court

by John Dickson Carr

  “For the moon is the mother of lunatics,” said Partington, dreamily, “and has given to them her name.—Some say so.”

  “You always were a materialistic soul, Tom. Still, there’s truth in it. And is there anything queerer or more outlandish in the supernatural,”—at this point Stevens saw the expressions on his companions’ faces change; he had no doubt his own did as well—“than,” said Edith, “that somebody’s mind should be affected from umpty-million miles away by a—well, a——”

  “A piece of green cheese,” said Partington. “I suppose not, but why this mysticism?”

  “Because I hope you’ll laugh me out of it. I want,” said Edith, grimly, “to see a piece of green cheese. Remember, Lucy, there was a full moon on the night Uncle Miles died; and how we admired it; and you and Mark sang coming home? When a person begins to think about the non-dead…”

  Mark spoke as quickly and heartily as though he had never heard the term; but his voice was, if anything, a trifle too loud. “The what? Here, where did you pick up that rubbish?”

  “Oh, I read it in a book somewhere. … I’ll not go upstairs, but I will go out and find something to eat. Come on, Lucy. I’m tired; I’m dreadfully tired. Will you make some sandwiches?”

  Lucy bounced up briskly, and winked at Mark over her shoulder. When they had gone, Mark prowled twice round the room with moody absorption before he stopped by the fireplace and began to roll a cigarette. Somewhere in the room a concealed radiator began to rattle and whack as Henderson in the cellar got up steam.

  “We’re all keeping something back from one another,” Mark said, and flicked a match across the stone. “You notice that Miles’s body disappearing didn’t seem to startle them—or at least Edith—overly. They didn’t want details. They didn’t want to peep. They didn’t want to… Oh, damn it, what’s in Edith’s mind? The same thing that’s occurred to us? Or is it only night-time and the jimjams? I wish I knew.”

  “I can tell you,” growled Partington.

  “And she read it in a book, too. The non-dead. She read it in a book, the same as you did.” He looked at Stevens. “I suppose it was the same book?”

  “It couldn’t very well be. This one is still in manuscript. It’s Cross’s new one—Gaudan Cross. You’ve read some of his stuff, haven’t you?”

  Mark stopped. The match was still burning in his hand as he stared at the other; he held it levelly, and, as though at some instinct beyond sight, just before it burnt his fingers he twitched it out. But he continued to look at Stevens with eyes wide open.

  “Spell that name,” he requested. Then he said: “It can’t be. You’re right, Part; I am getting the jimjams, and very shortly my imagination will put me in a state where I need a sedative myself. The proof of it is that I’ve seen that name dozens of times, and yet it never occurred to me (in my right senses) to see any resemblance before. Gaudan Cross… Gaudin St. Croix. Ho-ho-ho! Give me a kick, somebody.”

  “Well, what about it?”

  “Don’t you see?” demanded Mark, with a sort of ghoulish eagerness and mirth. “When you get into such a business as this, all you’ve got to do is let your imagination run and it’ll see anything you like. Here’s Gaudan Cross, probably a harmless old son of a what not, who writes pretty good stuff; and yet by looking at that name you can construct a whole cycle of the non-dead, and a return for ever of the slayers and the slain. … Gaudan Cross. Gaudin St. Croix, in case it interests you, was the celebrated lover of Marie D’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers, who first instructed her in all the arts of poison. He died before her; in his laboratory over his own poison-kettle; otherwise he’d have been broken to death on the wheel, or sent to the stake by the tribunal they established to deal with poisoning cases—a tribunal called The Burning Court. It was through St. Croix’s death that they discovered evidence, in a certain teakwood box, which led Madame to be suspected. She had grown tired of him, and had grown to hate him; but that’s neither here nor there. St. Croix died somehow. … Dumas says he was trying to manufacture a poison gas when his glass mask slipped and he fell forward dead of its fumes with his head in his own cauldron… and the hunt was up for Madame la Marquise.”

  “I’ve had about enough of this for one night,” said Stevens, curtly. “If you don’t mind, I’ll get along home now, and we can wall up that tomb in the morning.”

  Partington looked at him. “It’s a fine night,” Partington said. “I’ll walk down as far as the gate with you.”

  X

  They walked down the drive, under great trees and past places of shrubbery. For a time both Partington and Stevens were silent. Mark had gone out for a last conference with Henderson, and to put the tarpaulin used for the tennis court over the entrance to the crypt. Stevens wondered what (if anything) was on Partington’s mind; so he opened the attack.

  “Any ideas about the theft and return of the bottle,” he asked, “beyond what you told the women?”

  “Eh?” Partington roused out of his abstraction. He had been looking up at the starlight, shuffling his feet on the gravel as though to pick up the way. Now he considered. “Well, as I told you, I like to get things down on regular charts. We know that a small bottle, containing something which in a large dose would be a deadly poison, was stolen and afterwards returned. That’s all we know, and all we’re likely to know until we see that nurse. We don’t even know whether it was in liquid or solid form, which is the most important point.

  “But there are two possibilities as to what the stuff might have been. First, it might have been a heart-stimulant like strychnine or digitalin. If that’s so—well, frankly, it’s very bad. It might mean that the poisoner (if there is a poisoner) hasn’t finished his work.”

  Stevens nodded.

  “Yes,” he said, “I’d thought of that, too.”

  “But I can tell you,” said Partington, dryly, “that it isn’t a very likely possibility. If anything like that had been stolen, the doctor would have had the house pulled apart until that sort of stuff was found or accounted for. Neither he nor the nurse seems to have been unduly disturbed. Irritated, rather; do you follow me? Similarly, what was stolen couldn’t have been an irritant poison like antimony, for instance, or you can bet your last dollar they’d never have given a death-certificate testifying that Miles died of natural causes.

  “No. Our second possibility is much more likely. Our second possibility is Mark’s theory that a few morphia tablets were stolen.”

  “By Miles?”

  Partington scowled. This point seemed to bother him more than any other.

  “Yes, it’s quite possible. And it’s the easiest way out. We’re all looking for easy ways, aren’t we?” The pouched eyes turned round in the starlight, curiously. “But there are a few points against tacking it on Miles. There’s the return of the bottle. Now, we know that Miles’s room was next to the nurse’s. We know that, after the bottle was stolen, the nurse kept her door locked—that is, the door to the hall. But there was another door, communicating directly with Miles’s room, and presumably she didn’t keep that locked as well against her patient. So, if Miles stole the bottle and wanted to return it, why didn’t he walk through the communicating door and put it in her room? Why did he put it down on a table outside the door?”

  “That’s easy to answer. Because the nurse would know right away who had done it. He would be the only one with access to her room.”

  Partington stopped in the drive, and swore faintly.

  “I’m getting soft-headed in my old age,” he said. “That’s plain, certainly. Also—look here, I was wondering whether the nurse might not have locked the communicating door to Miles’s room as well as the door to the hall. She may have suspected Miles as well.”

  “Yes, but even so, what are you driving at?”

  “The motive,” Partington insisted, doggedly. He made a slight movement of his hands in the air, as of an intelligent man who finds difficulty in articulation. “The reason why morphia was stolen. Ei
ther Miles stole it, or somebody else did. Now, if Miles stole it, the motive is understandable. But suppose someone else stole it? What could it have been used for?

  “It couldn’t have been for another murder. A few tablets were stolen—two or three, perhaps. Not many more, or the doctor would have made a fuss about it. As a rule, morphia is given in quarter-grain tablets. It would take two or three grains to put a man in danger; four grains to make certain of the business. So it couldn’t have been for murder. Next, disregard the idea that anybody in the house is a drug-user. If that had been the case, you can be pretty certain the whole bottle would have been taken and never returned. Next, was somebody merely aching for a good night’s sleep? It’s possible; but in that case why use such strong stuff, that’ll blot you straight out and isn’t necessary unless you’re suffering? Why not take ordinary veronal tablets, such as were admittedly in the bathroom? In either case, why be so damned secretive as to STEAL the morphia?—So, if none of these things sounds reasonable, for what purpose did the thief want it?”

  “Well?”

  “Well, suppose you had a night’s work to do,” pursued the other, with toiling lucidity, “and there was somebody who might hear you or see you at it? If you dosed that person with a quarter-grain of morphia, the coast would be clear, wouldn’t it?”

  Again he stopped and turned around, with a lowering frown under the starlight. His eyes fixed on Stevens, and the latter braced himself for what he thought was coming. As though in a picture he saw, in that moment, the night when Miles had been poisoned: the night when he and Marie were at the cottage less than a quarter of a mile away; the night when he himself had tumbled over with unaccountable drowsiness before ten-thirty.

  Then Partington spoke unexpectedly.

  “You see, I was thinking of our biggest problem—the opening of the crypt and the vanishing of the body. But if both Mr. and Mrs. Henderson had been dosed with morphia, would they have heard body-snatchers at work? Would they?”

  “By God, that’s true!” Stevens exploded, with a violence of relief. He hesitated, nevertheless. “That is——”

  “You mean that others in the big house might have heard the racket? And also that Henderson swears the entrance to the crypt hasn’t been disturbed? All right; admit he’s honest. But that’s not the only consideration. It’s true we made a lot of noise and a lot of mess. But remember what we did. We broke the paving-stones with wedges and hammers. Now remember how those stones are laid down. They’re rather thin pieces of crazy-paving, set together with mortar in the crevices like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle put together with glue. There’s no concrete, adhesive concrete, under them, only soil and gravel. Why couldn’t a whole piece of the paving have been cut out in one long block—and simply lifted up? It would require a little breaking of the mortar, but only one thin short line at either end. It could be tilted up on its side in one piece, and set down again like the stone slab under it. And Henderson, seeing an apparently whole pavement under him, could reasonably say what he did. You might make a mess taking out the soil and gravel. But remember that there were still traces of a mess from the opening of the crypt a week before.”

  Stevens wanted to believe it as much as Partington evidently did. If any doubts stirred at the back of his mind, they were not ones at which he could coherently think. He was occupied with another sort of problem, a more personal one. He and Partington had now come to the gates of the park. They stopped to look down into the breezy dimness of King’s Avenue, where street lamps were far between, and the tarred surface of the road glistened in a black river underneath. Partington, who had lost some of his earlier diffidence, now went back to it. He added, more mildly:

  “Sorry to talk so much. The point is, we’ve got to believe something. Edith’s told you that I’m a materialist. I don’t see any reason for being so scornful about that. I admit it. Edith told me a lot of things in the old days. She always believed that I performed the abortion on that girl because the business was my doing, and all because the kid worked in my office. Who was the materialist then, I ask you?”

  That last drink, snatched before he left the house, had almost unlocked his tongue. A note of intensity would come up; and then, with equal suddenness, he would check himself in that way he had evidently learned so well.

  “Yes, it’s true. A primrose by the river’s brim, a yellow primrose was to him: or to me at least: and not whatever it was the sage wanted me to see in it. It’s not a symbol of nature, or a mystic bud flowering into an excuse for bad verse. There are a lot of things more beautiful to look at—a running horse, for instance, or the skyline of New York. Your damned primrose is simply a tolerably pretty flower that might make an ornament in a bowl on the table. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes, I suppose I do.”

  “And, consequently, all this talk about ghosts and non-deads and—” He stopped, with a lumbering smile, faintly short of breath. “I WILL shut up, in spite of myself,” he added. “You can depend on it, I’ve hit on the right explanation of the crypt. Unless, of course, there was some hocus-pocus on the part of the undertaker.”

  “The undertaker,” repeated Stevens. “Do you mean J. Atkinson?”

  He saw the doctor’s eyebrows raise. “Old Jonah? Yes. I suppose you know him; he’s quite a character. He must have buried several generations of Despards, and he’s a very old man now. That’s why our friend Henderson was so petulantly certain the undertaker couldn’t have gone in for any hocus-pocus: because it was Atkinson. Mark pointed out his place again to me as we were coming through tonight. Mark says old Jonah’s son has taken over the active work now, and is putting some ginger into the business. Old Jonah was a great favorite of Mark’s father; Mark’s father, with some sort of private joke, used to ask him whether he was still in his ‘blameless tea-shop,’ or his ‘corner’; I don’t know what he meant. Possibly— Oh, good-night.”

  Stevens, convinced that the man had passed that hazy line of tipsiness which separates sense from wandering, had bidden him good-night and set off briskly down the avenue. The briskness was a pose. He wanted to be alone. He did not slow down his quick walk until he heard Partington’s own footsteps crunch away to silence up the drive.

  Then he wanted to do something as a physical outlet for bewilderment: shake his fist, or hit something, or merely clench his teeth in hopeless perplexity. The whole thing was too intangible. If he could (as Partington wished to do) resolve these doubts into ruled lines, if he could have some cool-witted person stand in front of him and ask clear questions, he might understand better. He tried to ask himself the questions. Do you believe that there is something wrong with Marie? But how do you mean, wrong? In what particular way? And there was where the mind drew back, almost physically, as though from a fire; where the mind shut itself up. He could not answer the questions because he could not voice them. They were too fantastic. After all, through what odd crack in his brain had this idea been able to penetrate? Was there any actual evidence for it? It all centred round a photograph, not six square inches of cardboard; a similarity in names, a devilish similarity of feature—yes, and the fact that the photograph was missing. That was all.

  He stood now before his own white cottage, staring at it. The light over the front door had been put out. There was no light anywhere in the house, except a red, shifting gleam through the window of the living-room. Evidently Marie had kindled a fire in the fireplace, which was curious, because she had a dread of fire. It gave him a vague sense of alarm.

  The front door had been left on the latch. He opened it, and went into the dark hallway only faintly illumined by flickers from the living-room on the right. Nor was there any sound except the almost indistinguishable drawing and sizzling of the fire; green wood must have been used.

  He called, “Marie!”

  Still there was no sound. In the same sort of uneasiness he went into the living-room. Beyond any doubt the fire had been built of green wood; it was a large one, almost smothered in oily yellowi
sh smoke through which little spiteful curls of flame wormed through. He heard its oozing hiss and pop. A little of the smoke spilled out over the hood of the stone fireplace. It was odd, he thought, how those split gleams distorted the familiar room, but there was light enough to see by the chimneypiece a tabouret bearing a plate of sandwiches, a thermos-bottle, and a cup.

  “Marie!”

  When he went out into the hall again, his footsteps seemed to fall so heavily on the floor that even the hardwood creaked. He brushed against the telephone table, and put his hand automatically on the briefcase still lying there. This time he could feel that the briefcase was open, the manuscript lying left askew inside, as though it had been taken out hurriedly and replaced.

  “Marie!”

  Even the treads of the stairs creaked noisily under him as he went up. A bedside lamp was burning in their room at the back of the house; but the room was empty and the lace coverlet of the bed undisturbed. On the mantelpiece a busy little clock animated the quiet: it was five minutes past three. Then he saw the envelope, propped up on the bureau.

  DEAR TED [said the note]: I’ve got to go away for tonight. Our peace of mind depends on it. I’ll be back tomorrow, and please don’t worry, only it’s horribly difficult to explain. Whatever you think, it’s not what you’re thinking. I love you.

  MARIE

  P.S.—I must take the car. Have left food for you, and coffee in a thermos-bottle, in living-room. Ellen will be in tomorrow morning to get your breakfast.