The Burning Court (18 page)

“I don’t know,” Mark replied, rather wearily. He sat down in the chair and ruffled the hair at his temples. “There’s no real harm in Ogden. I mean that. He wouldn’t—that is,
intentionally
—I’m not making myself quite clear, but the point is he probably didn’t think there was anything really wrong. He simply did it to make a little trouble and watch people jump. Ogden is the sort of person who, if he were giving a jolly little dinner party, would invite two notorious enemies and seat them together at the table. He can’t help it; he’s like that. That quality sometimes makes great scientists, sometimes great sneaks, and sometimes both. But as for thinking there was anything actually——”

“Oh, rubbish, Mark,” said Lucy, with asperity. She was in a flouncing, bouncing mood, possibly because she appeared worried. “You simply cannot seem to believe there’s ever anything wrong with anyone. There’s something wrong with Ogden. He’s—changed, somehow. He was never so bad as this before. And he seems positively to hate Marie Stevens. (Sorry, Ted.) Do you mean to say he could write a letter like that, practically accusing a member of his own family of murder, and not think there was anything wrong?”

“How should I know? He’s certainly been one first-class spy, the damned young whelp! I wonder he didn’t guess we were going to open the cryp——”

Mark stopped dead. There was a palpable silence in the room, broken by a slow, measured tapping. Brennan, at ease in the straight chair by the typewriter, had removed his glasses and was tapping them on the top of the desk. Brennan regarded the company with grim affability.

“Go on,” he said. “Go on. Don’t stop there, Mr. Despard. You were going to say, ‘open the crypt.’ I’ve played square with you, and I’ve been waiting for you to play square with me.”

“Foxy Frank—” said Mark. He opened his mouth and shut it again. “Do you mean to tell me you know about that, too?”

“Yes. That’s what’s been worrying me. That’s what’s been on my mind. That’s why I don’t know what in—” Brennan’s almost elephantine delicacy in front of a woman made him break off and roar
thunderation
with some effect of anticlimax—“to make of this nightmare, this foolishness, this jungle of unadulterated bunk! And I’ve been waiting for you to tell me what you found in the crypt.”

“If I told you what we found there, you wouldn’t believe me.”

“I’d believe you all right. You bet I would. Mr. Despard, I know every move you and your friends made yesterday, from the time you met Doctor Partington at pier 57 in New York. There was a ‘tail’ on you.”

“You know about last night?”

“Listen!” urged Brennan, holding up one finger with an arresting motion and taking another paper out of his briefcase. “You came back from New York with Doctor Partington at 6:25 p.m. You came up to this house. At 8:05 you left it again, and both of you drove down to the little white house on the left-hand side of King’s Avenue as you come up it. The house belongs to a Mr. Stevens. … I guess that’s you,” he added, turning to Stevens with matter-of-fact pleasantness. “You stayed there until 8:45. Then you and Doctor Partington returned to this house. You two, with a servant named Henderson, went back and forth from the house to Henderson’s house, gathering up tools. At 9:30 Mr. Stevens joined you. At 9:40 you four started to open the crypt, and you got it open at just a quarter to twelve.”

“Henderson said there was some one watching us,” Mark growled, uneasily. He glanced at Brennan. “But——”

“Three of you went down into it. Doctor Partington went back to the house, but joined you in two minutes. At 12:28 Doctor Partington, Mr. Stevens, and Henderson came pelting out of the crypt so hard that the ‘tail’ thought something was wrong, and followed. But it was evidently the odor of the place: the first two came up to this house with Doctor Partington, got two step-ladders, and returned at 12:32. Doctor Partington returned at 12:35. At 12:45 there was a devil of a noise of you upsetting some marble urns. At 12:55 you gave it up and went to Henderson’s place——”

“You can spare us the details,” growled Mark. His voice took on a note of urgency. “There’s just one thing, though. Never mind what we did; we know that well enough. But could this ‘tail’ of yours
hear us?
Could he overhear what we were saying?”

“He could while you were in the crypt or in Henderson’s house. In case you don’t remember it, the windows of Henderson’s living-room were open. So he heard most of your talk.”

“Sunk,” said Mark, after a pause.

“No, don’t let it get you down,” advised Brennan, picking up his glasses again. “I’m telling you all this in detail—well, to explain why I showed up on your doorstep so early this morning. The ‘tail’ stuck to your party until three o’clock this morning. He didn’t interfere with you; he had orders not to. But as soon as he left he came chasing out to Chestnut Hill, where I live, and proceeded to wake me up. He said he couldn’t have slept last night if his life depended on it: it’s the first time I ever saw Burke rattled. He said: ‘Captain, they’re a bunch of loonies. They’re stark, raving nuts. They talk about dead people coming to life. They say maybe the old man got up out of his coffin and walked out of that vault, and that’s why it’s empty now.’ So I thought I’d better get out here as soon as I could.”

Mark, who had taken to striding round the room again, stopped and stared at him with dry glee.

“Ah, now we come to it. Now we approach the fount and origin. Do you believe we’re a bunch of loonies, Captain?”

“Not necessarily,” said Brennan, considering the question down the side of his nose. “Not necessarily.”

“But you agree that the body disappeared out of the crypt?”

“I’ve got to. Burke was pretty emphatic about that. He said you thought of everything the police department could think of. My own guess is that he was too plain scared to go down into the crypt himself after you had all left and it began to look a little spooky. Especially as—” He glanced towards his briefcase and checked himself abruptly.

Mark was alert. “Here! Just a moment. ‘Especially as—’ what? This whole interview has consisted in taking unexpected rabbits out of the hat. I’ll ask the same question Lucy did a while ago: have you got any more rabbits in your hat?”

“Yes,” said Brennan, calmly. “For instance, I’ve got a complete check-up on the movements of the other members of this household for that night, April 12th.”

After a pause he went on:

“The trouble with you, Mr. Despard, is that you’ve been hypnotized by Mrs. Despard. I mean,” he rumbled, hastily, shutting his eyes as though in apology, “by the possibility of her being guilty. And your sister, too. But there were others in the house. I’ll take them in turn, beginning with your brother, Mr. Ogden Despard—the same as I did with your group. All right. Now, I’d understand from what Mrs. Henderson said that he was out of town yesterday; so I couldn’t question him, or thought I couldn’t. But I put a man to look him up, and, by a piece of good luck, we found out what he was doing on the night of the murder.”

Mark reflected. “As far as I remember, he had intended to go to an alumni dinner of his preparatory-school year at the Bellevue-Stratford in town. But we held him up so long here, waiting for Mrs. Henderson to get back from Cleveland, that he must have missed it. I remember he was still here when we left for the masquerade at half-past nine.”

“I wonder—” said Lucy, suddenly, and stopped.

“You wonder what, Mrs. Despard?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“Well, that’s right, anyhow,” said Brennan. “Mrs. Henderson remembered where he was going. He left here about 9:40, driving a blue Buick. He drove to town, and got to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel at about 10:35, when the dinner was over but the speech-making was going on. He was seen to come in. Afterwards, it seems, some of the alumni had rooms at the hotel, and were doing some celebrating. He joined the party, and his movements can be proved from 10:35 until 2 a.m. Result—another complete alibi. Again I’ll admit that nobody would be likely to mistake him for the visitor, any more than they would you. But I’m being thorough.

“Next on our list there’s Miss Myra Corbett, trained nurse.” Brennan looked up from his notes, grinned, and made a gesture. “Well, now, I didn’t think it was very likely that trained nurses run around murdering their patients. But it was another thing that had to be checked. I put a good man on to it,
and
,”
said Brennan, significantly, “we got an interview with her as well as checking her movements.”

“You mean,” Lucy put in, quickly, after a pause, “you got her to talk about—things that happened while she was here?”

“Yes.”

Lucy regarded him as though she were searching for a trap.

“You’ve still got something up your sleeve,” she accused him.

“Did she—did she say anything about a little bottle of something being stolen from her room?”

“Yes.”

“Well?” demanded Mark, exasperated. “Does she know who stole it, whatever it was?”

“She believes it must have been one of two persons,” replied Foxy Frank, looking at them with great deliberation. “But we’ll go into that in a moment. First, her movements. The night of the 12th was her night off. We traced her back to her—um—sinister lair in the Spring Garden Street Y.W.C.A. She got there about seven o’clock. She had dinner at the Y.W.C.A., went to a picture-show with a girl-friend about 7:30, came back about 10, and went to bed. This is confirmed by another nurse, who shares a room with her. One more complete alibi.

“Next and last we have Margaret Lightner, your maid, now staying with her parents in West Philadelphia. …”

“Margaret?” cried Lucy. “Did you even go after her? I remember. I gave her permission to go out on a date that night.”

“Yes. We found that out. We also got hold of her boyfriend, and another couple who’d been out on a double-date with them. The four of ’em spent the evening driving (and by this they mean parking) all over the place. Anyway, from about half-past ten to midnight they were stopping somewhere out in the wilds in Fairmount Park. So that gets rid of any idea that the maid—she’s Pennsylvania Dutch; did you know it?—might have been the woman in your uncle’s room at 11:15.”

Mark was staring at him with puckered eyelids.

“I don’t see what Margaret’s being Pennsylvania Dutch has to do with it,” he remarked. “But the implications of this are getting beyond me. Look here. You believe Mrs. Henderson’s story, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Brennan, thoughtfully. “Yes, I believe it.”

“And you don’t have any idea that old Joe Henderson, her husband, was mixed up in it, do you?”

“No.”

Mark put his fists on his hips. “In that case, my lad, you’ve eliminated the whole crowd! You’ve proved an alibi for every single person in the house or associated with the house. There’s nobody else who could have done it. If the police are going to believe that this business was supernatural, after all——”

“Man,” said Brennan, with a sort of wild petulance, “I wish you’d snap out of this and try to see just what did happen here that night. I’ve been explaining to you like a kindergarten-teacher because you’re all as jumpy as rabbits, and you wouldn’t have answered any questions unless you could get it out of your systems that one of
you
was guilty or that it was some tommyrot about ghosts. What I wanted to show you was plain all along. I knew it the moment I heard about the business. This little stunt was pulled by an outsider.”

After a pause he went on, broadly:

“Don’t look so flabbergasted. It’s good news, isn’t it? Now figure it out for yourselves. The poisoner was a woman. On the night of the 12th she knew that most of you would be out. She knew that Mrs. Despard was going to a masquerade, and she knew the kind of costume Mrs. Despard would wear. That’s a cinch: she even imitated it down to the extent of a gauze scarf over the head and shoulders. So she came here—probably wearing a mask, too—knowing that if anybody saw her they’d take her for Mrs. Despard. And that’s just exactly what happened.

“But it’s not all she did. Mrs. Despard was going to this party and wearing a mask. Sure; but there was a chance that everybody in the place would know who she was and be able to give her an alibi afterwards. So the poisoner cooks up some kind of fake telephone call to Mrs. Despard at St. Davids.” He glanced over at Lucy with sudden shrewdness. “We don’t know who that call was from or what it was about. Mrs. Despard doesn’t seem to want to talk about it.”

Lucy opened her mouth to speak, flushed, and hesitated.

“But never mind. I’ll bet you ten dollars to a plugged nickel that the call was a fake. It was intended to send Mrs. Despard out on some wild-goose chase so that she couldn’t prove where she was. Remember what time the call was made? About twenty minutes to eleven. If she went out, and stayed out for three-quarters of an hour, or an hour— See what I mean? But Mrs. Despard changed her mind and didn’t go.

“The real murderer (or maybe I ought to say murderess) wasn’t much afraid of being seen. And I’ll tell you why—because she came by a secret passage. But then up came Mrs. Henderson, to listen to the radio. And there was a hole in that curtain over the window looking on the sun porch. Still, this didn’t bother the woman, because she’d still be taken for Mrs. Despard unless somebody saw her face. Mrs. Henderson talked a lot of how still this woman was, and how she didn’t seem to move at all. You can bet your bottom dollar she didn’t! She didn’t move because she’d have had to turn around, and she might have been recognized.

“Now, I’ve been gassing away here. But you’re the people who have got to do the thinking now. You want to find somebody who knows this house inside out and is an intimate friend of yours and knows what was going on that night. Have you got any ideas?”

Lucy and Mark turned to stare at each other.

“But that’s impossible!” Lucy protested. “You see, we keep ourselves pretty secluded here. We don’t go out much. I like going out, but Mark hates it. That masquerade was something of a treat. And, you see, we have no intimate friends except——”

She stopped.

“Except—” prompted Brennan.

Lucy turned slowly round and looked Stevens full in the face.