The Burning Court (17 page)

So far, the record had sounded all the more damning since it was shorn of atmosphere and suggestion. All the same, Stevens wondered how Brennan’s matter-of-factness would treat the end of the story—the visitor’s exit through a door which did not exist.

Then Brennan came to it.

“Now, Mr. Despard,” he confided, “the only part of it that wasn’t just straight was right there. Mrs. Henderson says that this woman ‘walked through the wall.’ It’s right here—‘walked through the wall.’ She couldn’t or wouldn’t make it clearer than that. She said the wall ‘looked like it changed, and then changed back again.’ Get me? All right. Well, the Commissioner said to her, ‘I think I know what you mean. You mean the door to a secret passage, don’t you?’ That made sense, naturally. I know myself that this is a very old house.”

Mark had been sitting back rather stiffly, his hands in his pockets and his eyes fixed on the detective. His face was as inscrutable as Brennan’s. “And what,” he asked at this point, “did Mrs. Henderson say to that?”

“She said, ‘Yes, I guess that’s what it must have been.’ And it’s the thing I wanted to ask you. I’ve heard a lot about secret passages, but, to tell you the truth, I never actually SAW one. A friend of mine claimed he had one in his attic, but it was a fake; it was only the place where they kept the fuse-box, and you could see the door if you looked close. So, naturally, I was pretty interested. There’s one in that room all right, isn’t there?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“Yes, but there
is
one? You could show it to me, couldn’t you?”

For the first time Mark seemed to feel that he was fighting on his own ground, with words rather than facts.

“Sorry, Captain. They didn’t have fuse-boxes in the seventeenth century. Yes, there was once a door there. It led to another part of the house, which has been burned down since. The trouble is, I’ve never been able to find the catch or spring that opens it.”

“All right,” said Brennan, eyeing him. “The only reason I asked was that, if you could have shown Mrs. Henderson was lying beyond any doubt, we wouldn’t have needed to be suspicious of anybody but
her.
”

After a pause, during which Mark seemed to be cursing inaudibly, the captain went on.

“So that was the situation we had on our hands. If we believed her, we had a cut-and-dried case. And there’s no use saying we didn’t believe her. I can sort of smell a liar the minute I see one.” He gave a slight wave of his hand, looking round the room. “We had the time of the murder fixed at about 11:15. We had the cup containing arsenic, seen in your uncle’s hand. We had a description of the dress worn by the woman——”

“You had everything, in short,” said Mark, “except any actual evidence that murder had been committed at all.”

“That’s right!” Brennan agreed, instantly, and tapped the briefcase. He seemed pleased that Mark should have appreciated the point. “So you see how we were situated. First we phoned Doctor Baker and asked privately, what he thought of the idea of Mr. Miles Despard being poisoned. He said we were crazy. He said it was impossible, though he admitted that the symptoms with which Mr. Despard died might have been the symptoms of arsenical poisoning. Of course his attitude was plain. No family doctor wants to start trouble of that kind if he can help it. If there’s an exhumation order, and an autopsy, and it turns out that he was wrong—well, it’s just too bad for him. Next the Commissioner tried to get in touch with you, to see what you had to say to all this. But he couldn’t locate you, at either your office or your home. …”

“No,” said Mark, who was regarding him with a hard and wary stare. “I was in New York. I went to meet a friend of mine just arriving from England. Mr. Partington over there, as a matter of fact.”

Partington, who had been sitting by the fireplace with his clasped hands on his knees, looked up. The shadows showed deep wrinkles in his forehead, but he did not comment.

“Yes. We found that out,” Brennan answered, briefly. “Now face the facts,” he went on. “A woman in masquerade costume was in the room. We knew from Mrs. Henderson that your wife and your sister, and you as well, were at a masquerade at St. Davids on that night. It looked as though it must have been one of the two: pretty certainly your wife, because Mrs. Henderson—the day afterwards—saw the costume Mrs. Despard had been wearing, and admitted it was like the dress worn by the woman in that room. Easy now! I’m just telling you.

“But yesterday we couldn’t get hold of either your wife or your sister because both of ’em were in New York too. So the Commissioner decided to check up on all your movements for the night of the 12th. He could do it without kicking up a rumpus, because he knows the man who gave the party, and knows a lot of the people who were there.—Now. Mr. Despard, I’ve got a full report on all of you, particularly for those critical times around 11:15. If it’s all right with you, I’ll give you the gist of it.”

There was a sort of bursting pause. It was very hot in the room, where two centuries seemed to wait and listen. Out of the corner of his eye Stevens had seen the door move; somebody must have been listening from the first. He thought it was Ogden. But, as the door opened still farther, he saw that it was Lucy. Lucy Despard came in very softly and stood in the corner by the door, her hands straight down at her sides. She was so pale that the faint freckles stood out on her face; and her hair, parted at one side as though with an angry sweep of the comb, showed dead black against it; but she looked mutinous.

“First of all,” Brennan pursued, without looking at her or seeming to notice her presence, “we’ll take you, Mr. Despard. Yes, yes; I know nobody would be likely to mistake
you
for a small woman in a low-cut dress. But, to prove the absence of any funny business, we’ll just take it in order. You’ve got a cast-iron alibi for the whole evening, especially as you didn’t wear a mask. Two dozen people are willing to swear where you were at any given time. I needn’t give you all the dope because it’s not important. But it’s established that you couldn’t have left the house and come here. So that’s that.”

“Go on,” said Mark.

“Next there’s Miss Edith Despard.” Brennan ran his eye down the sheet. “She got there with your party at about 9:50. She was wearing a white hoopskirt outfit with black trimmings, a white bonnet, and a black domino mask. She was seen dancing between 10 and 10:30. At about 10:30 the hostess met her. Your sister had managed to tear some lace bloomer, or pants, or some damn thing, that she was wearing under the hoopskirts——”

“Yes, that’s right,” assented Mark. “She was still grousing about it when we came home.”

“—and she didn’t like it. So the hostess told her there were bridge tables in another room, and asked her if she would like to play bridge. She said she would. She went to this room, and naturally she took off her mask. From about 10:30 until 2 A.M., when all of you went home, she was playing bridge. There’s a whole crowd of witnesses of this. Result: complete alibi.”

Brennan cleared his throat.

“Now we come to your wife, Mr. Despard. She was wearing a silk dress colored blue and red, with wide skirts and things like diamonds in it. She didn’t have a hat, but had a gauze scarf over the back of her head. She also wore a blue domino mask with lace on the edges of it. She started dancing right away. At about 10:35 or 10:40 there was a telephone call for her——”

“A telephone call!” said Mark, sharply, and sat up. “A telephone call at somebody else’s house? Who was it from?”

“That’s the part we can’t get,” snorted Brennan. “We don’t know who answered the phone. The only reason it was noticed at all was because some man dressed like a town-crier (nobody seems to know who he was, including the host and hostess) started going among the dancers imitating a town-crier and saying Mrs. Mark Despard was wanted on the phone. She went out. Next, the butler saw her come into the front hall about 10:45. The butler is sure of this. There was nobody else in the hall. She was going towards the front door, and she didn’t have her mask on. The butler noticed her especially because he saw she was going out, and he went to open the door for her; but she hurried out before he could get there. As it happens, the butler stayed in the hall. Well, about five minutes later Mrs. Despard came back again—still not wearing her mask. She went across towards the room where they were dancing, and was asked to dance by a man dressed as Tarzan. She had two successive partners after this: we’ve got the names of both. At 11:15 she was dancing with some one everybody noticed—a big figure about seven feet tall, thin as a rake, and with a skull for a head——”

“By God, yes!” Mark cried, softly, and struck the arm of the chair. “I remember now. It was old Kenyon—Judge Kenyon, of the Superior Court. I had a drink with him afterwards.”

“Yes. We found that out. Anyhow, it was noticed; because the host said to somebody, ‘Look, there’s Lucy Despard dancing with Death.’ They both noticed this because Mrs. Despard leaned back and lifted up her mask to get a better look at Death. The time, as I say, was exactly 11:15. Result——”

Brennan put down the paper.

“Complete alibi,” he said.

A great weight had gone from Mark Despard. He straightened up in the chair; he seemed gradually to commence to see things; and in this shaken condition he acted with what was—for Mark—something like a flourish. He jumped up from his chair and turned towards Lucy.

“Let me,” he said, in a rolling voice like an actor’s, “present you to the lady who danced with Death. Captain Brennan, this is my wife.”

He somewhat marred the effect of this by adding in a peevish tone, “Why the devil couldn’t you have told us all this as soon as you got here, instead of fooling around for so long and making us feel like murderers?” But Stevens’s attention was concentrated on Lucy and Brennan.

Lucy had come forward immediately, with her free and easy stride, and that manner of hers which put everyone at ease. Though her light-brown eyes had a twinkle of amusement, she was still pale and she did not seem so relieved as a spectator would have expected. Stevens noticed that she glanced quickly at Mark.

“I think you know, Captain,” she said, “that I overheard everything you were saying. I’m rather sure you intended me to. But there are a whole lot of things that—that should have been discussed before, and are only just coming out now. I—I—” Her face tightened, and momentarily she was on the edge of tears. “I never knew there was so much behind this. It would have been better if I had. Anyhow, I’m terribly grateful to you.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Mrs. Despard,” said Brennan, surprised. He stood in front of her, shifting from one foot to the other and avoiding her eye. “Just the other way round,
I’d
say. But I’m telling you it’s a good thing you decided to come back after you went out, that night of the party, and the butler saw you come back. You can see for yourself you’d have been in a jam if you hadn’t.”

“By the way, Lucy,” Mark put in, casually, “who was that telephone call from? Where were you going?”

She made a gesture of her wrist towards him without looking at him. “That doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you about it later. —Mr. Brennan, Mark asked you a minute ago why you didn’t tell him all these things flat out as soon as you came in here. I think I know the reason. I’ve heard of you. In fact, I’ve been warned against you, in a way.” She grinned. “No offence, but tell me, is it true that at City Hall you’re known as Foxy Frank?”

Brennan was unabashed. He returned the grin and made a deprecating gesture. “Oh, I wouldn’t believe everything I heard, Mrs. Brennan. The boys——”

“They say, to put it vulgarly,” Lucy told him, severely, “that you could talk a crook out of his back collar-button, and arrest him afterwards. Is that true? And if it is, have you got anything else up your sleeve?”

“If I have, I’m going to tell you what it is,” he replied, and stopped suddenly. “Where did you hear about me?”

“Hear? I don’t know. It stuck in my mind, somehow. From the Commissioner, maybe. But why? When we all got those telegrams from you, telling us to come home——”

“Yes, that’s what I mean. I didn’t send you any telegrams or messages. But somebody sent me one; I mean that letter signed Amor Whateveritis. Whoever wrote that had all the dope, and had it straight. Who did write it?”

“I think I can tell you that,” snapped Mark.

He strode across the room to where, in the clutter along the walls, stood a square desk-like box in walnut, covered with a cloth. Pulling the lid up with a bang, he revealed a folding typewriter-desk with a rather dusty Smith Premier machine. After searching in vain for some paper, Mark compromised by whipping an old letter out of his hip pocket and rolling the back of it into the machine.

“Try this,” he suggested, “and compare the typing with the typing on that letter.”

Brennan gravely fitted on a pair of owlish shell-rimmed glasses, sat down like a maestro at a piano, peered at it for a few moments, and then struck gingerly.
Now is the time,
he wrote,
for all good men
— The typewriter pecked sharply, like a hen after corn; Brennan studied it and sat back.

“I’m not an expert,” he admitted, “but it strikes me you don’t need to be. There’s no fingerprint plainer than this. They’re the same. Somebody in the house wrote it, all right. Got any idea who it was?”

“O
GDEN
wrote it,” said Mark, patiently. “Ogden wrote it, of course. I knew that the minute I looked at the letter. Ogden wrote it because he’s the only person in the house who could have written it. Look.” He turned to Stevens and Partington, fiery with the certainty of a new idea. “That part about me burying the cat was a dead give-away. Do you remember last night, when I was telling you about it? I told you that, while I was just finishing the burying, the lights of Ogden’s car came up over the hill and I was afraid he had seen me? Well, he did see me. Only he didn’t say anything. He watched.”

Lucy’s eyes were moving from corner to corner of the room. “And you think he sent the telegrams to us, too? But, Mark, that’s horrible! Why should he do a thing like that?”