The front door was opened by Mrs. Henderson.
Stevens examined her with a refreshed air of interest, as though he had never seen her before. She was stout and very plain, with a hard but kindly face, buns of greyish hair over her ears, an ample bust, and a petulant chin. You would diagnose her as a woman who might nag, but who would not see ghosts. Her Sunday-best clothes sat on her with an air of creaking. In the last fifteen minutes she had evidently been weeping.
“I saw you come up the path,” she told them, with dignity. “They’re all upstairs. All but Mrs. Despard. Why she—” Mrs. Henderson broke off plaintively, as at some grievance she thought better to repress in deference to Sunday. She turned round, her shoes squeaking, and began to lead the way. “But I say,” she added, darkly, over her shoulder, “this is no day for games.”
Apparently she referred to the fact that a hoarse voice, of inhuman loudness, was talking somewhere upstairs. It was evidently the radio in the sun porch, for she was leading them towards the sun porch. As they passed along the upstairs hall in the west wing, Stevens saw a figure dodge back into one of the doors. It was Ogden, for he also caught sight of a discolored face; Ogden was evidently not going to attend the conference in the sun porch, but Ogden was going to listen. Ogden’s shadow followed them round the turning, seeming very long-necked.
The sun porch was a long and wide room, built chiefly of glass towards the west. Its dark-rose curtains were pulled back before a watery sun. On the side opposite were the French windows opening into the nurse’s room, from which that room received its light. At the far end of the oblong was the glass door to Miles’s room. Though this was muffled now with the brown curtain, Stevens thought he saw two chinks of yellow light shining through.
The furniture of the porch was wicker painted white, with bright coverings, and there were some unfortunate potted plants. A stiff, formal, brushed air pervaded the company. At one corner, standing sheepishly, was Henderson. Edith sat with some primness in a large chair, and near her Partington (quite sober, and rather Mephistophelian today) lounged on a sofa. Captain Brennan leaned uneasily against the frame of one window. Miss Corbett, with the same formal air, was handing out sherry and biscuits. There was no sign of Lucy, or of Ogden, though they could all sense Ogden’s presence in the background. What was most notable was the absence of Mark—a sort of vast absence, as though with a gap in the normal, which you could feel.
Nevertheless, it was Cross who dominated that room, if only by showmanship. At one end of the porch, Cross leaned on the radio as he might have leaned on a lectern or a reading-desk. His bald head, with the one long fluttering hair, was inclined; his simian features showed great suavity. Miss Corbett handed him a glass of sherry, and he placed it on top of the radio as though he could not be interrupted in listening. Out of the radio the hoarse voice was still talking. It was preaching a sermon.
“They’re here,” said Mrs. Henderson, rather superfluously, pointing to the two newcomers. Edith’s eyes went quickly to Marie; something indecipherable changed behind them; but nobody spoke. “Even on the Sabbath,” Mrs. Henderson bawled, in a state of nerves, “do you need to have that radio so loud as——”
Cross touched the switch. The voice was cut off so abruptly that stillness was a clang. If he had meant to play on their nerves, he had succeeded.
“My good lady,” said Cross, drawing himself up, “how many times must it be necessary for me to inform the illiterate that Sunday is not the Sabbath? Sabbat is a Hebrew word meaning Saturday. The Witches’ Sabbath, for example, is a Saturday. But the choice of words is fortuitous; for we are about to discuss witchcraft and sham witchcraft. You, Mrs. Henderson, have been the enigmatic witness throughout this investigation. You can settle our difficulties. You have told at least a tangible, if not altogether coherent, story concerning what you saw through that door…”
“I don’t believe it,” said Mrs. Henderson. “Our minister calls it the Sabbath, and it’s Sabbath in the Bible, so don’t you talk silly. As for what I saw, never you mind what I saw. I know what I saw all right, without anybody telling me. …”
“Althea,” said Edith, calmly.
The woman checked in mid-flight. They were all, it was clear, afraid of Edith, who remained sitting bolt upright, with one finger beginning to tap the arm of the chair. Partington sipped sherry without relish.
“I ask you that,” pursued Cross, unruffled, “because I should like to make sure you know what you did see. Look down at the door now. You will see that I have adjusted the curtain as I am led to believe it was adjusted on the night of Wednesday, April 12th. Kindly inform me if there are any points of difference. You will also note that a light is burning in that room. It is the light over the head of Mr. Miles Despard’s bed. The curtains are drawn in that room, and we have a passable darkness there. Now will you go down, look through the left-hand chink in the curtain, and tell me what you see?”
Mrs. Henderson hesitated. Her husband made a gesture as though to lift his hand. And, behind, Stevens heard footsteps as Ogden Despard approached; but nobody looked round. Mrs. Henderson, a trifle pale, glanced at Edith.
“Do as he says, Althea,” said Edith.
“And, in order to reproduce the conditions more or less as they were on that night,” Cross went on, “I must turn on the radio again. However, I think it was music then? Music? Good. Therefore——”
As Mrs. Henderson went down to the other end of the porch, Cross spun the radio dial. A hollow and broken confusion came tumbling and spinning out of the loud-speaker; followed, with silver clearness, by the tinkle of a banjo and a sugary voice. “Oh, I went down south,” sang the voice, “for to see my Sal, singing polly-wolly-doodle all the day. My Sal she am a lovely gal, singing polly-wolly—” and then they heard it no longer, for Mrs. Henderson screamed.
Cross clicked the switch, and there was silence. Mrs. Henderson, her eyes looking dull and hungry, had whipped away from the window to face them.
“What did you see?” inquired Cross. “Keep your seats, the rest of you! Don’t get up. What did you see? The same woman?”
She nodded.
“The same door?”
“I—yes.”
“Once again,” said Cross, inexorably. “Take another look. Don’t flinch, or I’ll have your hide. Once again.”
“—for I’m off t’Louisiana for to see my Susie-anna, singing——”
“That’s all,” said Cross, switching off the radio again. “I must repeat, I should not like anyone to get up yet. Frank, you had better stop that young man; he is too precipitate,” Ogden had come round the turning of the sun porch, and, though his face was not pleasant to look at, he had evidently forgotten all about it. Ogden was making for the glass door when Brennan easily put out a hand and restrained him. “With your permission,” said Cross, “I will deal first with the smallest, most obvious, and accidental part of this case. It was not intended to be a part of the case at all. On the contrary, it was a chance (or mischance) which almost wrecked the plans of the murderer. It was a matter of un spectre malgré lui.
“Throughout this case you have been pelted constantly with two facts concerning Mr. Miles Despard and his room. The first fact is that he spent so much time locked up in his room, having little to do but change his clothes through varying hues and styles; although he was sensitive on this point of vanity. The second fact is the extreme meagreness of lighting arrangements there. There are, in fact, only two lights—neither one of great power. The first is over the bed; the second is high up on a cord between the windows. Finally, most of the time Miles Despard spent in his room was during the evening.
“If you will endeavor, by a concentration of intellect which you all no doubt find fatiguing, to focus your minds on these points, you will at least dimly perceive the significance of this. What are the two necessities of a man who is constantly admiring his own appearance by changing his clothes? Aside from the clothes themselves, he needs two things: he needs a light to s
ee himself by, and a looking-glass to see himself in.
“There is, it is true, a bureau and a glass in that room. But the bureau is placed in an impossible position, where it would get very little light from the windows in daytime, and none at all from the two electric bulbs by night. But there is one curious point. Between the windows, where it does not illuminate anything except a chair and a picture, is a high-hung lamp serving no apparent purpose on a perfectly blank wall. What sort of lamp is it? It is the sort which hangs over a bureau. Now if, for the purpose of better illumination, the bureau were rolled between the windows at night…
“If this were done, it would be necessary to hang the picture (a very valuable one) somewhere else: as a temporary measure, until the bureau was rolled back again. Where could it be hung? There are no other hooks or nails, unoccupied, in the room—except one. This is the nail in the door to the nurse’s room, where this afternoon I saw a blue dressing-gown hanging up at about picture height on the door. Similarly, the chair must be placed somewhere. To avoid anyone coming in unexpectedly (which we are informed Mr. Despard hated) it must be placed with its back propped, as a wedge, under the knob of the nurse’s door.
“We have the following conditions. We have the light now turned out over the bureau, so that there is no illumination except a glow over the bed so dim that a witness cannot tell the color of a woman’s hair. We have a tiny chink in the curtain, which gives a view only high up, for the mysterious woman was seen only above the waist. We have—across from the mirror of the bureau—a door set into the panelling which goes round the room. This is the door to the nurse’s room, which would be dimly reflected in the glass, and which is panelled like the wall. On the door to the nurse’s room we have the Greuze picture hung up, and the chair beneath. The whole scene takes place almost in darkness. Any noise of footsteps, the click of a lock on the closing of a door, is masked by music on the radio. It is therefore certain that what the witness saw was the reflection of the door to the nurse’s room in the mirror over the bureau.
“I think, Mrs. Despard,” Cross added, “you may come in now…”
The glass door at the end of the sun porch opened; there was a swishing of skirts, and Lucy, in a sombrely brilliant gown of satin and velvet, came out into the porch. The dark red and blue colors were kindled by a glitter of sham diamonds. Lucy, throwing back a gauze scarf off her head, looked slowly round the group.
“Mrs. Despard,” Cross went on, “kindly assisted me in a little experiment. She simply walked in and out of that room in almost complete darkness, reflected in the mirror of a bureau now placed between the windows.
“But here again, if we accept this,” he continued, enjoying himself so hugely that his monkey-bright eyes opened wide, “we have another apparent impossibility. However the mysterious woman got into the room, it is absolutely certain that she must have left it—in a quite ordinary way—by means of the communicating door to Miss Corbett’s room. It is now clear that Mrs. Henderson saw her reflection when she went out. But, on that particular night, Miss Corbett had done certain things. In the first place, Miss Corbett had bolted that door on her side. Next, on the door of her own room giving on the hall, she had taken apart and so altered the lock that it could not be opened except by manipulation of the key in her hand.
“We have, then, two impregnable doors. The mysterious woman, leaving the room after having poisoned Miles Despard, could not have walked through a bolted door. Even had she done so, she could not afterwards have escaped through still another trick-locked door into the hallway, and, though there are windows in the room, she could not have gone out into the sun porch here, leaving the windows locked on the inside—especially since Mrs. Henderson was actually in the sun porch. Therefore it is certain that one person in this whole case, and only one, could have committed this murder. The only person who could have committed it was one who returned to the house near eleven o’clock; who opened the hall door of the nurse’s room by means of a key she alone knew how to use; who passed through her own room; who unbolted the door to Miles’s room; who went in with a poison-cup disguised as medicine; who forced him to take it in her own role; who afterwards went back through her own room, bolting the door again on her side and relocking the hall door after she had gone…”
Cross brought his hand down softly on the top of the radio, so softly that the glass barely shook. He bowed a little. He said:
“Myra Corbett, it gives me great pleasure to inform you that you are under arrest. The warrant is, I think, made out in your real name rather than the one you have assumed—Jeannette White.”
XXI
She had backed away very slightly, towards the French windows opening into the room she had formerly occupied. She was not wearing a uniform now, but a neat blue dress which became her. In spite of a none-too-good complexion, the sudden color in her face gave it animation and showed that she had good looks. Her corn-colored hair showed flat and lifeless, plastered in waves against her head. But again, as a sign of animation, her eyes were terrified—and unpleasant.
Myra Corbett moistened her lips.
“You’re crazy,” she said. “You crazy little man! You can’t prove that.”
“Just a moment,” interrupted Brennan, moving forward heavily. “You can say what you like; this doesn’t have to be a formal arrest; but I can warn you to be careful. Do you deny that your real name is Jeannette White? Don’t answer; there’s somebody here who ought to know. What do you say, Dr. Partington?”
After a pause Partington, who had been staring at the floor, lifted a dark, heavy, ugly face. “Yes, she is Jeannette White,” he answered. “As you say, I ought to know. I promised her yesterday I wouldn’t say anything, but if she’s done this——”
“Yesterday, Doctor,” Brennan said, smoothly—“yesterday, the first time I met you, you were jolted up so much I thought you were going to faint. I knocked on the door of this house; I said I came from police headquarters; and right away, over my shoulder, you saw the girl who used to work in your office, on whom you performed an illegal operation. I’ve heard that you only escaped criminal prosecution by getting out of the country. You risked it again by coming back when Mr. Mark Despard sent for you. Isn’t it true that the reason why you were knocked endways was because you saw me and this girl together?”
“Yes, it’s true,” said Partington. He put his head in his hands.
Brennan turned back to Myra Corbett. “I’ll ask you something else. Do you deny that, a year or so ago, you met Mr. Mark Despard again and picked up this same affair?”
“No, why should I deny it?” she cried. They heard the noise of her finger-nails scratching on the sides of her dress. “I don’t deny it. I’m proud of it. He’s fond of me. I was a better——than any of his women, present company included. But that’s a different thing from murder!”
Brennan looked savage and tired. “I can further tell you,” he went on, “that your alibi for the night of Wednesday, April 12th, is blown higher than a kite. It’s a funny thing. Yesterday the first person I pounced on was Mrs. Stevens, there,” he nodded towards Marie, who was looking curiously at the nurse; “and the reason for it, among others, was that her alibi for that night depended on the word of only one person—her husband, who was sleeping in the same room. It didn’t seem to occur to anybody that there was only one other person in the whole shebang whose alibi also depended on a single person’s testimony—yours, Jeannette White. That testimony was the girl’s who occupied the same room with you at the Y.W.C.A. You got her to swear you were there from ten o’clock on. All the others had half a dozen witnesses; even the maid was out on a double-date. … Actually, you were here, weren’t you?”
At this point the woman almost lost her nerve.
“I came here to meet Mark, yes,” she said, breathlessly. “But I didn’t see the old man; I didn’t want to see him; I didn’t even go upstairs. And Mark stood me up. Mark never came here, after all. He must have tumbled to it that she was wise, a
nd so— Where’s Mark? Mark will tell you! He’ll tell you! He’ll prove it. But he isn’t here, and…”
“No, by God! he isn’t,” Brennan said, softly but, grimly. “I think it’s going to take a whale of a time to find him, too, even with the drag-net out. The trouble was, he saw it coming. The trouble is, you and Mark Despard planned this murder together. You were to do the actual dirty work, and he was to cover up.”
For the space of about twenty seconds nobody spoke. Stevens glanced covertly round the group. Ogden Despard was standing in shadow, the better to hide the condition of his face; but on the puffy lips there was satisfaction.
“I don’t believe that,” said Lucy, calmly. “Whatever I may think of her, naturally I don’t believe that. What do you say, Mr. Cross?”
Cross, savoring the situation, remained poised over the radio.
“I was wondering,” he said, “when the obviously distracted state of this company would allow it to turn for assistance to a cooler mind and a more developed intelligence. Mrs. Despard, I do not think you had better appeal to me. Appealing to me seems to have become a general habit. The unfortunate truth, Mrs. Despard, is that your husband did plan the murder with Miss Corbett, and that he did cover it up afterwards. He is accessory before and after the fact; but there is one thing to be said in his favor. He had nothing to do with the attempt to throw suspicion on you. He never knew of it—until it was done. That was why he tried to shift suspicion off you again, and in doing so he confused, complicated, and made nonsensical a perfectly ordinary murder case.
“Let us consider the matter esthetically. If you are unable to consider it esthetically, pray try to consider it less like howling asses. The most significant point in this case—the point which betrays it—is the curious way in which two murderers, two intelligences, seemed to be pulling against each other.
The Burning Court Page 23
