Fire, Burn!

by John Dickson Carr

  It was curiosity, a curiosity simmering almost beyond endurance even in Mr. Peel.

  The Home Secretary’s lips were drawn down. Mr. Mayne openly stared. Behind the desk in the corner, Mr. Henley had propped himself upright on an ebony stick. Colonel Rowan, though better concealing his feelings, slapped and slapped with his white gloves at the white trousers below the scarlet coat.

  “Sir,” Cheviot answered, “as yet I can’t tell.”

  “You can’t tell?” echoed Mr. Peel.

  “No, sir. Not yet. This morning I obtained very helpful information from Mr. Frederick Debbitt, which is not in the report. But—”

  “Here’s a man,” exclaimed Mr. Peel, incredulously appealing to the others, “who takes but one glance at the evidence before him, and tells us nearly all of what has happened. Yet he can’t explain a detail like this?”

  Cheviot’s heart sank.

  After his work last night, work which would not even have earned him a word of commendation from the Deputy Commander in his past life, these people were so impressed that they expected miracles. And miracles they meant to have.

  There was more. This old house, much enlarged at the back to form a whole police-office, today stirred and was alive despite its unfinished confusion. The four Inspectors of the division, with short silver lace at the neck, and the Sergeants, with metal collar-numerals from one to sixteen, were present and correct. Sixty-five constables, he had been told, awaited his inspection on a small parade-ground at the rear.

  They were a hard lot, ready to snarl or grow sullen under a Superintendent who could not handle them. Even when he entered he had sensed hurrying footsteps, smelt a whiff of brandy, heard the whack-whack as two humorists struck in vicious mock-battle with wooden truncheons.

  In more senses than one, he was on trial.

  But Cheviot, who had been compelled to control his temper since early morning, did not fail to control it now.

  “Mr. Peel,” he said coldly, “I ask you to consider the difficulties here. For instance! You have read my report, I understand?”

  “Yes. Every word of it.”

  “You have also seen my sketch-plan of the upstairs passage where the crime was committed?”

  Without a word Mr. Richard Mayne dug among the sheets of the report, found the plan, and held it up.

  “All this,” complained Mr. Peel, “is surely unnecessary? I have many times seen the passage you describe.”

  “And I,” said Colonel Rowan, with his gaze on a corner of the ceiling.

  “Forgive me,” said Cheviot, “but it is not at all unnecessary. Finally, I call your attention to the surgeon’s findings and the direction of the bullet.”

  He paused, surveying each of the auditors in turn.

  “The bullet that killed Miss Renfrew,” Cheviot added clearly, “was fired in a dead straight line. You mark it? A dead straight line.”

  It was as though Mr. Peel had retreated a little, merely watching and weighing with those large, sensitive eyes. Both Colonel Rowan and Mr. Mayne, the Commissioners, edged forward.

  “I see what you imply, Mr. Cheviot,” replied Colonel Rowan. He took the sketch-plan from his companion and tapped it. “In this passage, facing the stairs, we have two single doors on the left, and one set of double-doors (to the ballroom) on the right. Therefore none of these doors could have opened. Else, with this—this poor lady’s body lying well to the front of them, the bullet would have taken a diagonal course and not a straight.”

  “Exactly! And then?”

  “Why, damme,” Mr. Mayne burst out at last, “it’s as plain as a pikestaff!”

  “Is it?” Cheviot asked.

  “The bullet,” said Mr. Mayne, “was fired from the rear of the passage. Somewhere very near the place where you and Henley were standing. You allow it?”

  “Apparently. Yes.”

  “We must grant,” continued Mr. Mayne, regaining his barrister’s dignity, “that neither you nor Henley is guilty. You would have seen each other. But what of the double-doors just behind you? Eh? What, I say, of the double-doors to Lady Cork’s boudoir?”

  “Well?”

  “Your backs were turned to those doors. They could have opened, I daresay?”

  “In theory, yes.”

  “In theory, Mr. Cheviot?”

  “Yes. But not,” retorted Cheviot, “without a snap and crack of the lock as loud as a light pistol-shot. As I pointed out in my report, the lock snaps whenever you open or close the door. We should have heard it; but we heard nothing. Second, is it likely that someone fired a pistol behind my shoulder, or Henley’s, without either of us feeling the sting of the powder or the wind of the bullet?”

  “Likely, sir?” repeated Mr. Mayne, with rich courtroom politeness. “Likely? My dear sir, that is what happened.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Despite himself Mr. Mayne shot out a pointing finger.

  “Wherever the place from which the bullet was fired, you have acknowledged it must have been close to you? Yes. And yet, you tell us, you heard little and felt little and saw nothing?”

  “Are you calling me a liar, Mr. Mayne?”

  “Gentlemen!” interposed Colonel Rowan, very stiffly. Mr. Robert Peel, hugely amused, glanced from one to the other and said nothing.

  “As for—er—impugning your veracity, Mr. Cheviot,” the barrister told him with dignity, “I do no such thing. I am a lawyer, sir. I must examine evidence.”

  “I am a police-officer, sir. So must I.”

  “Then be good enough to do so.” Mr. Mayne snatched the sketch-plan from Colonel Rowan and held it up. “In this admirable plan of yours, I note, we have the arrangement of all the doors.”

  “We have.”

  “Good! At some time before the murder, for example, could someone have slipped out of the ballroom unobserved by any of the other dancers?”

  “Not while Lady Drayton was waiting in the passage, no.”

  “Ah, yes! Lady Drayton,” said Mr. Mayne in a musing tone. His eyes, round and black and shining, rolled up suddenly; Cheviot felt a twinge of fear. “But we dismiss her, for the moment. Lady Drayton, as I understand it, was not sitting in the passage for the whole time before the murder?”

  “No. She had gone downstairs to fetch a list of Lady Cork’s jewels.”

  “Pre-cisely!” agreed Mr. Mayne, teetering on his heels. “Precisely! Therefore I repeat: could an assassin, he or she, have slipped out of the ballroom unobserved by any of the other dancers?”

  “Yes; quite easily. When I myself glanced into the ballroom, the dancers were so absorbed that none so much as glanced at me.

  “Ah!” said Mr. Mayne, teetering again. “I put to you, Mr. Cheviot, a feasible supposition. The assassin, let us imagine, slips out of the ballroom. He, or she, crosses diagonally to the door of the dining-room. We have here,” and he held up the plan, “evidence that there is a door from the dining-room to Lady Cork’s bedroom, and another door from her bedroom into her boudoir.”

  Here Mr. Mayne dropped the plan on the table, and stood teetering with his dark eyes shrewdly shining.

  “I put it to you, Mr. Cheviot,” he continued, “that the murderer could have been lurking in Lady Cork’s bedroom. As soon as you and Henley leave the boudoir, closing the double-doors, the assassin moves across and opens one leaf of the doors behind you. Under cover of the noise, he fires a shot past you below shoulder-height. He then closses the doors and departs by way of the bedroom. I put it to you”—again Mr. Mayne’s finger shot out automatically—“that this is quite possible?”

  “No,” said Cheviot.

  “No? And pray why not?”

  “Because,” Cheviot retorted, “Lady Cork was in the boudoir the whole time.”

  “I fail to—”

  “Do you, Mr. Mayne? Consider! When I entered the boudoir a brief time afterwards, Lady Cork was dozing beside the fire. But one snap of that lock roused her instantly.”

  “Well?”

&nb
sp; “Well, sir! Do you imagine the murderer could have crept into the boudoir, opened that cracking door, fired a pistol, shut the door again and moved away, all without our notice or Lady Cork’s? Or do you suggest Lady Cork as an accomplice in the crime?”

  There was a strained, polite silence.

  Mr. Peel nursed his chin, fingers hiding a smile. Colonel Rowan’s handsome face, the grey-blond hair swept up above the temples, was apparently not there at all. Richard Mayne remained poised, though the dark eyes sparkled with wrath.

  “You prefer an impossible situation, Mr. Cheviot?”

  “To your solution, sir, I do.”

  “There is, to be sure,” the barrister said thoughtfully, “an alternative and very easy explanation. But I hesitate to suggest it.”

  Cheviot merely lifted his shoulders and made a gesture for the other to go on.

  Richard Mayne’s round face softened. At heart, as he had proved in the past and was to prove in the future, he was a kindly and very efficient man. But his bouncing energy, at thirty-three, sometimes drove him at problems as though with his fists.

  Still hesitating, he strolled over to the nearer window. Mr. Mayne drew back one side of the red curtain. He looked out at the soft mud of the yard, churned with wheel-tracks and enmeshed in dead leaves. He glanced at Mr. Peel’s sober but luxurious carriage waiting there, at the dead bushes, at the one tall and crooked tree with a few yellow leaves still clinging to its branches.

  Then Mr. Mayne’s mouth tightened. He stalked back to the table, and tapped the sheets of Cheviot’s report.

  “Mr. Cheviot,” he said in a hard voice, “why are you shielding Lady Drayton?”

  Behind the desk in the corner, the pen dropped from Mr. Henley’s hand and rolled clattering across until the chief clerk seized it.

  Cheviot’s heart jumped into his throat.

  “Is there anything there,” he demanded, “to say I am shielding Lady Drayton?”

  Mr. Mayne made a gesture of impatience.

  “It’s not what you say. It’s what you don’t say. Come, man! Here is your most important witness, yet you scarcely speak of her. By your own account Lady Drayton was standing only ten or a dozen feet behind the victim. And, a most unusual circumstance, she was carrying a muff indoors. Are you a student of history, Mr. Cheviot?”

  “Fortunately for myself, I am.”

  “Then you will be aware,” the barrister said dryly, “that as early as the late seventeenth century, in the so-called and preposterous ‘Popish Plot,’ ladies were accustomed to defend themselves by carrying a pocket pistol in a muff.”

  Here Mr. Mayne drew himself up.

  “It would be a pity, Mr. Cheviot,” he continued with bursting politeness, “if our association began in a quarrel. But (forgive me!) we know so little of you. You are a well-known athlete, they say. Yet can you dominate the hard-bitten crew you purpose to command? Last night you boasted that any of us might take a pistol—yes, that pistol on the table now!—and fire at the stuffed bear by the mantelpiece, and you would tell us who had fired it. Have you fulfilled that boast? I think not. Instead—”

  Abruptly he stopped.

  He stopped, and turned towards the windows, because no one could have ignored the voice from outside.

  The voice clove through October air now turned from watery yellow to dull grey. Cheviot knew whose voice it was. It belonged to Captain Hogben, and had no trace of a lisp. Harsh, strident, it beat at the house in a fury of hatred and triumph.

  “Come out, Cheviot!” it screamed. “Come out, shuffler, and take what’s coming to you!”

  10

  The Battle in the Yard

  CHEVIOT TOOK THREE strides to the nearer window, and, like Mr. Mayne, flung back the curtain at one side.

  There were three of them, not thirty feet away from the house. They stood in the mud, motionless, under the tall and crooked tree with the few yellow leaves.

  Captain Hogben and Lieutenant Wentworth were both in full parade uniform. Against their scarlet coats the white cross-belts stood out vividly in the grey air, as did the white duck trousers for daytime wear. From each man’s left hip hung the long sabre in the gold scabbard, as straight as the top-heavy bearskin cap on each head. In fact, except for the short white plume on the left of Hogen’s tall cap, and the short red plume to the right of Wentworth’s, you could not distinguish the First Foot Guards from the Second.

  But there were other differences.

  Captain Hogben stood crookedly, under the high and crooked tree above him. His face showed red, his mouth split for yelling above the chin-strap. His left shoulder was up and his right humped down, white-gloved right hand gripping the stock of the horsewhip trailing out snakily behind him.

  Lieutenant Wentworth remained straight and rigid. Between them, shivering, stood Freddie Debbitt.

  Then Hogben’s eyes caught Cheviot’s through the window-glass.

  “Come out, coward!” he screamed. “Come out here now, or—”

  And Cheviot’s temper, so long restrained that day, blew to pieces with a crash all the more violent for being inaudible.

  He spun round. On his face was a smile so broad and murderous that for a second his four companions did not recognize him as the same man.

  “Excuse me for a moment, gentlemen,” he said in a voice he scarcely recognized himself.

  And he ran for the door and threw it open.

  Just outside, in the passage, there was already a clump and clatter of hurrying footsteps. Down the stairs poured tall hats of reinforced leather, and tight-fitting blue coats with lines of metal buttons. From the rear of the passage stalked a tall Inspector, with short silver lace at his collar, holding back the staring and straining men behind him.

  When they saw Cheviot in the doorway, every man stopped dead.

  Just in front of Cheviot stood a shortish but very broad man, marked as a sergeant by the metal numeral 13 on either side of his collar. He had a red face and a good-humoured eye, though his hard glance appraised the new Superintendent even when he stiffened to salute.

  “Orders, sir?”

  Cheviot did not speak loudly. Yet his voice seemed to penetrate to every corner of the house.

  “There are no orders. Let every man stay where he is. I deal with this myself.”

  The sergeant’s eyes gleamed. From under the back skirts of his coat, where it hung hidden, he whipped out the long baton of that very hard wood called lignum vitae.

  “Truncheon, sir?”

  “Now what need have I for a weapon? Stand aside!”

  Cheviot ran for the front door. It was a large, heavy door. When he turned the knob and flung it open, the knob bounced and rebounded against the inner wall.

  Every sense strung alert, eyes moving left and right and forward, he jumped down into the mud. Some dozen paces to his left, far out from the brick wall of the house, Mr. Peel’s large carriage waited, with two footmen up behind and a sleepy coachman on the box. One of the horses suddenly stirred and whinnied.

  Captain Hogben uttered a yell of triumph. Right hand back, he charged forward across the yard.

  According to every rule, Cheviot should have stood still and taken his lashing. He should even have cowered, arms protecting his face, as befitted one who had refused a challenge to a duel. This always happened in books; Hogben, Wentworth, Freddie Debbitt firmly believed it happened in real life.

  But he did nothing of the kind.

  Instead, left arm slightly lifted and right arm a little below, Cheviot raced forward to meet Hogben in the middle of the yard.

  Too late Hogben saw they must collide. Too late he recognized he should have stood off and lashed. But he could not stop his charge, and there was still time to use the whip. His right arm swung forward, the thin black whip curling out.

  Cheviot stopped short. Hogben did not. As his right arm flew forward, the fingers of Cheviot’s left hand gripped hard round the Guardsman’s wrist. Cheviot braced himself hard on his right foot, turned
slightly sideways, and yanked with all his strength.

  Captain Hugo Hogben, nearly six feet tall and weighing eleven-stone-ten, pitched headlong over Cheviot’s left shoulder.

  His sword-scabbard rattled and flew. He landed head down, his tall bearskin cap squashing and turning under him to spare concussion of the brain. His body landed with a shock and thud which drove the breath from his lungs and the wits from his head.

  Cheviot jumped over that motionless figure, sprawled in scarlet and white against the black mud. He tore the horsewhip from Hogben’s hand. Coiling it up as best he could, he threw it far away among the bushes.

  Then he jumped back again.

  “Now get up!” he said.

  A carriage-horse whinnied loudly and reared up. The coachman, down off the box, soothed the horse and muttered words nobody heard. A whush of chilly wind swept the bushes. A dead leaf spun off the tree, fluttered lazily, and floated down.

  Almost instantly Captain Hogben twitched hard and was on his feet.

  His gloved left hand ripped the chin-strap upwards. With both hands he slowly lifted the top-heavy cap from his head, and threw it aside. From uniform to face he was one spatter and smear of mud, except the clear patch over the forehead and eyes and round the ears where the cap had protected him, and a mudless space beneath his right eye.

  His eyes were bleared. He was none too steady on his feet. But he had guts enough for ten men.

  “Swine,” he said.

  And his gloved right hand whipped a vicious round-arm blow at his opponent’s face.

  Cheviot slipped under the blow. He seized Hogben, and spun him round backwards by his own front cross-belts. The dart was so unexpected that Hogben’s shoulders and arms momentarily fell loose.

  Instantly his right arm was gripped by the wrist, and locked up high behind his back. By instinct Hogben thrashed out towards the man behind him. He was just able to bite back a cry of agony.

  “If you do that again,” Cheviot said clearly, “you’ll break your own arm. Now be off with you before I throw you in the cells. And don’t make threats about horsewhipping people until you’re sure you can carry ’em out.”