The Burning Court

by John Dickson Carr

  “One tablet! But there were supposed to be three missing.”

  She was puzzled. “Then somebody else must have been at the bottle,” she said, with positiveness and obvious truth. “I was afraid of the things, really; I didn’t know but what I might kill myself, or something. Ted, I wonder what on earth the whole mess is about? Somebody did kill poor Miles. I know I didn’t, not even in a dream, because I couldn’t get to sleep until half-past eleven on that night. I wasn’t drugged and I wasn’t drunk, and I was lying right beside you and I remember it. You don’t know how much it’s helped to remember that. But I think that somebody up in the Park guessed what was worrying me. You say Edith…”

  She broke off, brushing the subject away.

  “But, oh my God! Ted, as much as I talk about being free now, it’s nothing to how I’ll feel if it’s shown there’s a natural explanation for all this! I mean—the murder. Is there? Can there be? You say Mr. Cross… What do you think of him, by the way?”

  Stevens considered. “Well, he’s an old brigand, of course. By his own story he’s a murderer and a thief and I don’t know what else: that is, unless it’s all hot air. If I had something he wanted, I should keep my eye open in case he cut my throat to get it. He seems completely without moral sense; if there were really any hang-over from the seventeenth century in human form, my guess is that it would take the form of Cross…”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “One moment, Maggie. I was going to add that, even when you say all this, the man is immensely likable—he seems to have taken a great fancy to you—and he is about as shrewd as they make ’em. Furthermore, if he manages to solve this mystery I’m going to boost his royalty rate up to twenty-five per cent on the first three thousand.”

  She shivered. Leaning forward, she started to open the window, and he opened it for her, so that they could both smell the clean air.

  “It’s misty, though,” she said. “I thought I smelt smoke. When this is all over, couldn’t you get leave of absence so we could take a trip somewhere? Or maybe I ought to have Aunt Adrienne down here, to see how she looks away from her setting at Guibourg, and prove that she’s only an ugly old woman, after all. Do you know, I really can recite the ritual of the Black Mass? I saw it— It’s a foul thing; I’ll tell you about it sometime. And that reminds me. Just a minute.”

  She broke away from him and ran out into the hall; he heard her going upstairs. When she returned she was holding out, as though it might burn her, the gold bracelet with the cat’s head. Even in the gloom by the window he could see that her face was flushed and her breast was heaving.

  “There it is. That’s the only thing of hers I have now,” she said. She lifted her eyes, and he could see the pin-point black pupil in the grey iris. “I kept it because it was rather pretty and because it was supposed to bring good luck. But now I’ve seen it in the photograph of your eighteen-sixties lady, I want to have it melted down or—” She looked out of the window.

  “That’s right. Fire it out the window.”

  “It—it cost a lot of money, though,” Marie said, doubtfully.

  “Be damned to that. I’ll buy you a better one. Here, give it to me.”

  All his own rage at himself seemed to have become centred in that bracelet as a symbol. With a long, low whip, like a catcher to second base, he sent it flying out of the window; and relief welled up in him with the very swing of his arm. It curved past the elm tree, flicking a branch, and was lost in the mist; and at the same time there rose out of the mist the sudden squall and snarl of a cat.

  “Ted, don’t—” cried Marie. Then she said, “You heard that.”

  “I heard it,” he said, grimly. “That’s a good heavy bracelet, and there was steam behind it. If it caught that cat in the ribs, there was good reason for the cat to yowl.”

  “But there’s somebody coming,” she told him, after a pause.

  First they heard footsteps in wet grass, then on the gravel path. A figure began to loom up out of the mist, hurrying and taking stumping steps.

  “Agreed,” he replied. “But did you think you were calling spirits out of the vasty deep? That’s only Lucy Despard.”

  “Lucy?” said Marie, in a queer tone. “Lucy? But why is she coming the back way?”

  They both went out to the back door before Lucy had knocked. Lucy came into the kitchen, pulling off a sodden hat, and rather fiercely smoothing down her dark hair. Her coat had been put on in such a hurry that her dress was disarranged, and the lids of her eyes were red, though she was not crying now. She sat down in a white chair.

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to inflict myself on you for a while,” she said. She looked at Marie as though in appraisal and wonder, but new worries seemed to come into her head and she dismissed the first thought. Her voice was husky. “I couldn’t stand it up there any longer. Yes—I will have a drink, if you’ve got one. There have been awful things happening up there. Ted… Marie… Mark’s run away.”

  “Run away? Why?”

  She remained silent for a moment, looking at the floor. Marie put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Because I sent him, in a way; and other things,” answered Lucy. “It—it was all right until lunch. We wanted that rather nice police officer—Foxy Frank, you know—to have lunch with us. But he wouldn’t; he insisted on going out to a lunch-wagon. Up to then Mark had been very quiet. He still was quiet. He didn’t say anything or even show any temper, but that’s why I knew something was up. We all went into the dining-room, and just as we were going to sit down at the table, Mark walked up to Ogden and hit him in the face. Then he beat him. How he beat him! I couldn’t stand watching it, and nobody could pull him off. You know what Mark is. He beat him until… well, afterwards Mark just walked out of the room without saying anything, and went to the library and smoked a cigarette.”

  She drew a shuddering breath and looked up. Marie, puzzled and uneasy, glanced from Stevens back to Lucy.

  “I wouldn’t have wanted to see it,” Marie said, with a higher color; “but, honestly, Lucy, I can’t see anything to make much fuss about. There, if you want the truth! Why somebody hasn’t done that to Ogden before I’ve never been able to understand. He’s been asking for it for a long time.”

  “He has,” agreed Stevens. “It was for writing that letter and sending those telegrams, I suppose? Good for Mark.”

  “Yes, Ogden admitted he did that. But that wasn’t all. The person who antagonizes Ogden,” said Lucy, in a colorless voice, “is a fool.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” observed Marie. “I’m willing to antagonize him. He—well, he tried to make up to me, once, in a more or less subtle way; and he seemed completely staggered that I wasn’t in the least impressed.”

  “Just a minute,” said Lucy. “That’s not all. Edith and I washed his face and brought him round; he was beaten clear insensible, you see. As soon as Ogden could get on his feet he called us all together and said he had something to tell us. He took the room next to the one Mark was in, so Mark could hear. … I—I don’t know how much you’ve heard about Tom Partington’s case. Doctor Partington. He used to be engaged to Edith. But it was discovered that he performed an abortion, and he only escaped criminal prosecution by getting out of the country. Edith always believed, or said she believed, that the girl was his mistress. As a matter of fact, I don’t think Edith ever really cared for him. Edith’s a grand person, but she’s cold, cold as ice; and I believe she was only getting married for the show of the thing. So she broke it off because of this girl—Jeannette White. … But Ogden told the truth today. The girl wasn’t Tom Partington’s mistress. She was Mark’s.”

  After a pause Lucy added, in the same colorless voice: “Tom was Mark’s best friend, and yet Mark never told him, never told anybody else. He let Edith go on thinking what she did think. Tom Partington never knew who the man was, for the girl wouldn’t tell. So Mark kept quiet in spite of how much Tom cared for Edith. You see, Mark was engaged to
me at the time, and he was afraid to speak.”

  Stevens paced up and down the kitchen. He thought: Affairs are too much tangled and incomprehensible in this world. If Mark Despard did that, he did a meaner thing than Ogden has ever done; and yet it does not particularly lower Mark in my opinion; for to me Mark will always remain likable, and Ogden, to put it civilly, something else altogether. He found, with some surprise, that Marie felt the same way.

  “So Ogden,” said Marie, with contempt, “played tattle-tale.”

  “That’s not the point,” interposed Stevens. “How did Partington take it? Was he there?”

  “Oh yes,” Lucy replied, nodding with a dry, bright glaze in her eyes. “And that wasn’t so bad. It didn’t seem to bother him greatly. He just shrugged his shoulders—and spoke pretty sensibly. He said ten years was too long a time to bother over anything much, particularly a love-affair. He said that by this time he was more in love with liquor than he could be with any woman. No, it wasn’t Tom that made the trouble. It was I. I said some pretty awful things. I also told Mark I never wanted to see him again, and in that quiet, solemn way of his he took me at my word.”

  “But what on earth for?” cried Marie, opening her eyes. It surprised her husband that this Dresden-china doll, now wearing her spiritual expression again, could go so practically to the point. “I mean, why did you have to say that? After all, it can’t be because he—did things to this girl ten years ago. Lucy dear, you find me a man who hasn’t done that, and he’ll be rather awful, won’t he? And it was ten years ago. What’s more, it can’t be because he let this Mr. Partington down so badly. That’s very wrong and terrible, no doubt; agreed; but, after all, it only showed Mark loved you, didn’t it? And that’s all I’d care about.”

  Stevens had prepared a drink for Lucy, who took it with eagerness. She hesitated over it, put it down, and the color in her face grew higher.

  “Because I’m afraid,” she said, “he’s been seeing the girl again since.”

  “The same girl? Jeannette White?”

  “The same girl.”

  “And is Ogden,” asked Stevens, bitterly—“is Ogden, as usual, the source of information? Personally, I think Ogden must be unhinged. He’s had to conceal his malice for so long, under a sort of good-fellowly and pleasant unpleasantness, that, now he’s come into his uncle’s money, it’s gone to his head.”

  Lucy fixed her eyes steadily on him. “You remember, Ted, the mysterious phone call which almost took me away from the dance at St. Davids, so that except for a freak of luck I shouldn’t have had an alibi? That call was anonymous——”

  “Ogden’s touch is discernible again.”

  “Yes, I think it was Ogden.” She took up the glass. “That’s why I almost obeyed it. Whatever else Ogden is, he’s invariably accurate. That call said that Mark was tied up again with his ‘old flame, Jeannette White.’ You see, at that time I hadn’t heard—or at least I couldn’t remember—the name of the girl in the Partington scandal; I never connected the two. But it was a woman. And Mark… doesn’t seem to care much about me any longer.”

  She got the words out with difficulty. Then she emptied her glass very quickly, and remained staring at the opposite wall.

  “The call said that on that very night, using the convenience of masks so that I shouldn’t know where he was, Mark was going back to our house and see this girl. In our own house. The call said that, if I would take fifteen minutes out and drive to Crispen, I could see for myself. At first I didn’t believe it. Then I looked all over the house where the masquerade was being held, and I didn’t see Mark. (As a matter of fact, he was playing billiards in a room at the back of the house with two friends of ours; I found that out later.) I started to go out; then I thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and I came back. But then, this afternoon, when Ogden came out with the name of Jeannette White as being the girl in the Partington scandal, I—I——”

  “But are you sure it’s true?” demanded Stevens. “If Ogden’s phone call was wrong that night, why shouldn’t this accusation be wrong?”

  “Because Mark admitted it. And now he’s gone. Ted, you’ve got to find him! It isn’t for me; it’s for his own sake. When Captain Brennan learns Mark’s gone, he’s likely to think all sorts of things that haven’t anything to do with this case.”

  “Doesn’t Brennan know it yet?”

  “No. He went out a while ago, and came back with an odd little man in an awful fur coat, who’s most amusing, but I’m not in the mood for being amused. Captain Brennan asked me whether I’d mind having the man around, because he says this man—Croft or Cross I think his name is—knows criminals’ minds as he knows the palm of his hand. They went down into the crypt, and when they came up again Captain Brennan was red in the face and this little man was laughing fit to burst. All I could gather was that they didn’t find a secret passage there. I asked Joe Henderson what they were doing, and… You know that old wooden door at the foot of the stairs into the crypt, that won’t quite close?”

  “Yes. Well?”

  “Cross was moving that back and forth, Joe says, and laughing again. I don’t know what’s up, but it scares me. Then they went up to the sun porch—you know, with the glass door looking into Uncle Miles’s room. They fiddled with the curtain, and sighted through it, and had a fine time of one sort or another. Have you any idea what they meant?”

  “No. But,” said Stevens, “there’s something else on your mind, Lucy. This isn’t all. What else is worrying you?”

  Lucy’s jaw became set.

  “It doesn’t worry me, exactly,” she responded, with such rapidity as to be almost incoherent. “That is, it might be in any house. Captain Brennan admitted that himself, when he found it; it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. All the same, it would worry us horribly if we hadn’t known we all had perfectly good alibis for Wednesday night. The fact is, not very long after you left, Ted, Captain Brennan found arsenic in the house.”

  “Arsenic! Good God! Where?”

  “In the kitchen. I could have told him myself it was there, if I’d remembered it. But I had no reason or occasion to think of it, had I? Nobody so much as mentioned arsenic until today. …”

  “Who bought it, Lucy?”

  “Edith bought it. For the rats. But she’d forgotten all about it.”

  There was a silence. Lucy again tried to drain an empty glass. With a little shiver, Marie went over and opened the back door.

  “The wind has changed,” she said; “there’s going to be another storm tonight.”

  XX

  There was another storm that night, while Stevens endlessly drove round Philadelphia in search of Mark. Mark might not necessarily have gone into town, of course; but he had not taken a car or packed a bag. He might have gone anywhere. Stevens’s first belief, that he had merely reached a point of bedevilment beyond his nerves’ capacity and had, therefore, gone on a spree, changed to uneasiness when there was no trace of him at his clubs, at his office, or any usual haunt.

  Wet and dispirited, Stevens returned late to Crispen. It had been arranged that Cross should spend the night at his cottage; but he did not see Cross until nearly midnight. He went first to Despard Park, giving Lucy false reassurances about Mark. The house was very quiet, and Lucy seemed the only one still up. When Stevens went back to his own house, he found Cross and Brennan in the former’s limousine, just outside.

  “Have you—?” he asked.

  Brennan seemed rather gloomy than otherwise. “Yes, I think we know the murderer,” Brennan answered. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to verify; I’m going in to town to do it now. And then… yes, I’m afraid it’ll be all up.”

  “Although in general,” said Cross, sticking his neck out of the car, “I deplore these humanitarian notions, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the study of crime, this time I cannot agree with my foxy friend. This, sir, is an ugly business, a damned ugly and unpleasant business, and I shall not be sorry to see the guilty per
son electrocuted. Mr. Stevens, I regret to say that I shall be unable to avail myself of your hospitality tonight, much as I am obliged for the invitation to spend it under your roof. I must continue with Brennan and prove my case. However, I promise you a solution. If you and your good lady would care to call at Despard Park tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock precisely, I shall introduce you to the murderer.—Henry, forward. Step on her tail.”

  Marie, she confessed, was not sorry Cross could not remain there for the night. “He’s been very nice, and I’m terribly grateful to him,” she said, “but there’s something creepy about him. He seems to know exactly what you’re thinking about.”

  Though they went to bed at midnight, and though he had had no sleep the night before, Stevens could not close his eyes; he was too strung-up and over-tired. The clock in the bedroom ticked loudly. Thunder was incessant for the first part of the night, and there seemed to be an unusual noise and disturbance of cats round the house. Marie fell into an uneasy doze; towards two o’clock she was stirring and muttering in her sleep, and he turned on the bedside lamp, intending to wake her if she wandered into a nightmare. She was pale, her dark-gold hair spread out on the pillow. Whether at the light, or the rain, or the congested weather, the noise of cats seemed to have come in close round the house. He looked round for something to throw, but he could find nothing except an empty jar of cold cream or something like it in the drawer of Marie’s dressing-table. When he opened the window and threw a missile for the second time that day, he was rewarded by a squall of such almost human savagery that he closed the window. He fell into a troubled doze himself about three o’clock, and did not awake until he heard church bells on the following Sunday morning.

  When they set out for Despard Park just before two o’clock, they dressed as carefully as though for church. It was a rather heavy spring day, with the sun behind clouds, yet of warmth and kindliness. A Sunday hush was on Crispen and on the Park when they walked up through it.