The Burning Court (25 page)

The others looked at one another, while Mark patted Henderson’s shoulder. Brennan was irresolute. After a hesitation, he walked across the room and snapped the catch of the light-switch: the light came on. He clicked it a few times, looking from it to Henderson. Stevens walked past him and out into the fresh air under the trees. As he did so he saw Brennan going towards the bedroom. After a minute or two Brennan also came out of the house.

“If you have no more immediate use for me,” Stevens said, “I’m going down home to get some breakfast.”

“Go ahead,” Brennan said. “But I want to see both you and Mrs. Stevens today; so I’d rather you stuck pretty close to home. She’d better get back from this shopping-trip before evening. In the meantime, I’ve got a lot to do. A whole hell of a lot,” he added, drawing out the words slowly and heavily, “to do.”

After turning away, Stevens swung back. “What do you think of—?” he nodded towards the house.

“Why, I’ll tell you. If that fellow’s a liar, he’s the slickest liar I’ve met in thirty years.”

“I see. Well—until this afternoon.”

“Until this afternoon. You’d better see your wife’s back by that time, Mr. Stevens.”

In his walk through the Park and down the hill he did not hurry. He did not hurry until he glanced at his watch and saw that it was past eleven o’clock. By this time she might have returned. But she had not returned, as he discovered when he reached his cottage. Ellen had come in and gone again; the whole house was tidy, and a note (another note) in Ellen’s Alpine handwriting informed him that his breakfast was in the oven.

He ate hard fried eggs and bacon on the kitchen table, eating slowly. In the midst of it he got up and went out into the front hall. On the telephone table in the hall, Cross’s manuscript still lay half out of its container and the briefcase, as he had left it. He drew it out so that he could see the title page.
A Study of Motives for Poisoning throughout the Ages. Gaudan Cross, Fielding Hall, Riverdale,
N. Y. He straightened the sheets carefully, sat down at the table, and picked up the telephone receiver.

“Operator. Operator? Can you tell me whether any long-distance call was put through from this number last night?”

Evidently they could.

“To where?”

“Yes, sir. Riverdale thhr-rr-ee six one,” replied the brisk voice.

Replacing the receiver, he wandered into the living-room and took down a copy of
Gentlemen of the Jury
from a shelf. On the back of the jacket the picture of Cross looked out at him, a thin, intelligent, rather sombre face, with hooded eyes and dark hair having only a touch of grey. He recalled the statement of the learned judge, quoted as a blurb, that the man who wrote Cross’s account of Neill Cream must have been in the courtroom; he recalled the newspaper comment, during the controversy, on the fact that Cross’s age was given as forty. He put the book back, patted it into place among the others, and went upstairs. In the bedroom he opened the door of Marie’s wardrobe, looking at each of the dresses that hung there. Since most of her clothes were at the New York apartment, there was not much to be seen.

Upstairs, downstairs, the clocks went on ticking; the usual tap drizzled in the bathroom; a creak or crack sported on the stairway: there rose up in loneliness the fifty noises of an empty house. He tried to read. He turned on the radio. He wondered whether he ought to have a drink; and, in his present mood, decided against it. At four o’clock it was a relief to find that he was out of tobacco, and that he must go down the road to the drug store for it. For he was on edge lest he should hear Brennan’s step coming up the walk; it was too quiet; some rolling devilry must have gathered again round Despard Park.

A few drops of rain struck him in the face when he went out of the house. He walked across King’s Avenue and up the short road to the railway station. The tops of the big trees nodded and danced; all things seemed dusky here. He had almost reached the druggist’s, where already lights glowed behind glass vats of red and green, when he heard what he thought he had heard the night before—his name called in the street. The door between the two windows labelled
J
.
Atkinson, Funeral Director,
was open. In the doorway some one was beckoning to him.

He crossed the street. The person who hailed him was a brisk, business-like, middle-aged man, growing somewhat portly, and very well dressed in a severely formal way. He had thin black hair, parted in the middle and brushed in strands across his head like the skeleton of a fish. His face was cherubic and genial, his manner pleasant.

“Mr. Stevens?” he said. “We haven’t met, but I know you by sight. I’m Mr. Atkinson—Jonah Atkinson, junior. My father has retired. Would you mind coming inside for a moment? I think I have something for you.”

Those discreet dark curtains beyond the windows were deceptive from the outside; they were higher then Stevens had expected. They shadowed the little waiting-room, a muffled soft-carpeted room with a curiously dream-like quality. It had an air of peace, as perhaps it was meant to have, and there was nothing to suggest its purpose except an immense marble urn, rather like the urns in the crypt, on either side of a rear door. Jonah Atkinson, whose every movement was unobtrusive, went to a table at one side of the room. If a certain curiosity was apparent in his manner, he seemed to be doing his best to repress it.

He came back, and held out to Stevens the photograph of Marie D’Aubray, who had been guillotined for murder in 1861.

“I was asked to return this to you,” he said. … “Good Lord! is there anything wrong?” he added.

How to explain a feeling of nightmare? Even Jonah Atkinson’s comfortable personality, even the black fishbone hair across his inclined forehead, partook of it. It was not merely caused by the picture. But Stevens, looking at the table from which he had taken the photograph, saw that on this table were unobtrusive magazines; and that, projecting from one of the magazines, a piece of string lay crookedly, and that the string was tied irregularly with knots.

“No. Oh no. No. Nothing,” Stevens told him, remembering the detective-story fantasy he had once had about this place. “Where did you get this?”

Atkinson smiled. “I don’t know whether you remember, but you got to Crispen last night by the 7:35 train. I was in the waiting-room here, after something or other, and I happened to look out of the window and see you——”

“Yes, yes, I noticed somebody!”

The other seemed puzzled. “There was a car waiting for you outside here. Just as the car turned round, I heard some one shouting out in the street. I thought I saw some one waving and shouting from the direction of the steps up to the railway platform. I opened the door there to see what was going on. The man who does part-time duty at the ticket office came down the steps when you drove away. It seems you dropped this photograph out of some manuscript, or something, in the train. The conductor noticed it, and tossed it out of the vestibule just before the train started again, to the man at the ticket office—he was just going off duty.”

Stevens’s thoughts flashed back to the train. In order to examine the photograph better, he had detached it from its clip to the paper. Then, when accosted by Welden, he had hurriedly shoved it out of sight under the manuscript. …

“The man,” Atkinson said, with a touch of irritation, “came across here after you’d gone, when I was still standing in the door. He said he was going off duty, and would I mind giving this to you if I saw you. He thought it was very funny, that fellow did: he showed the photograph to me and said it was more in my line than his.” Atkinson pointed to the inscription along the foot of the photograph, “guil—” “Anyhow, there it is. I thought you might want it.”

“I don’t think I could tell you,” Stevens said, slowly, “how glad I am to get this back. I wish all the questions were as easily solved. Look here. I want to ask you something, but I don’t want you to think I’m altogether crazy. It’s very important.” He pointed to the table. “How did that piece of string get there; the one with the knots in it?”

Atkinson, whose curiosity had clearly been about the picture, roused himself and peered round. Grunting he swept up the piece of string and put it into his pocket.

“That? Oh, that’s my father’s work. It’s a habit of his; he leaves ’em all over the place. He’s getting a little—well, you know. But he’s always done that. He takes a piece of string and ties knots in it, the way some people smoke and others twist buttons or rattle keys, to keep his hands busy. They used to call him The Old Man in the Corner. Read detective stories? Remember those Baroness Orczy stories where the old man sits in his corner, in the ‘blameless teashop,’ and eternally ties knots and designs in a piece of string?” Atkinson looked at him sharply. “He’s always done it, but he didn’t use to be so careless. Why do you ask that?”

The last few minutes had seemed to Stevens a vista of memory. He recalled Partington’s words last night, in speaking of Jonah Atkinson, senior, when he had thought Partington was drunk: “Old Jonah was a great favorite of Mark’s father; Mark’s father, with some sort of private joke, used to ask him whether he was still in his ‘blameless teashop’ or his ‘corner’; I don’t know what he meant.”

“I’d like to ask a favor in return,” Atkinson persisted. “Why do you ask that? It might be important to me. Has there been any—” He stopped. “I know you’re a great friend of the Despards. We officiated at Mr. Despard’s funeral. Has there been any——?”

“Trouble? Oh no.” He wondered what, if anything, he was allowed to tell. “But could one of those pieces of string have—well, could it have got into Miles Despard’s coffin?”

“I suppose it could. My father is still officially in charge,” Atkinson replied. He added, with a somewhat unprofessional note in his voice: “Hell’s bells! That’s inexcusable! I hope——”

Yes, but was it to be supposed that Atkinson the elder, with such convenience, invariably made nine knots in a string? And how did that explain the fact that a string tied in nine knots was found under Miles Despard’s pillow on the night he died, before the services of J. Atkinson were required? To Stevens, who was absently agreeing with everything Atkinson the younger said, this clarified very little with certainty.

It was both clarified and muddied; it explained the photograph; last night it might have explained everything. But now… At least he might make certain that Miles’s body had actually been in the coffin when it was carried down into the crypt. Telling the undertaker as much as he dared, he asked his questions. And Atkinson was emphatic.

“I knew,” he said, striking the table softly with his hand—“I know there was something queer going on at the Park! I’ve heard it everywhere. Oh yes; it’s between ourselves, of course. But I can certainly tell you what you want to know. There’s no doubt whatever that Mr. Despard’s body was put into the coffin. I helped do it myself. The pallbearers took over directly afterwards. My assistants will confirm all this. And the pallbearers, as you know, carried it directly to the crypt.”

Quietly the front door of the waiting-room opened and a man came in from the street.

In the street there was a dull grey light, with streaks and slurs of rain on the windows. The newcomer was silhouetted against it. He was a very small man, and much shrivelled, despite the fact that he wore a big fur coat. Some dandyism about the fur coat, or about the rakish brown soft hat drawn down in front, gave an unpleasant suggestion of Miles Despard. Yet dead men do not have limousines, like the Mercedes which was drawn up at the curb outside, with a chauffeur at the wheel. Above all the newcomer had only to take two steps forward, and it became clear that this was not Miles.

The fur coat was not extravagant dandyism; it had the antiquity of what conservative men wore thirty years ago. This man was over seventy. He had a face of remarkable ugliness; a wizened face, an almost simian face despite a good beak of a nose: yet it was not unattractive. Stevens had an impression that the face was familiar and that he had seen it many times, though he could not place it—it was blurred like a drawing. The newcomer’s monkey-bright eyes, cynical and rather savage, darted round the room. They rested on Stevens.

“Pray excuse this intrusion,” he said. “May I have a word with you, sir? I followed you in. I have come a long way in order to see you. My name is Cross—Gaudan Cross.”

“Yes, it is quite true,” the newcomer said, composedly. He reached into the furs and extracted a card. Then he regarded Stevens with a sort of quizzical impatience. “You were thinking that this face of mine,” he pointed to it, “is a somewhat older and less attractive one than I insist on having published on the jackets of my books. Obviously. Otherwise I should not have it published there. If you look closely, however, you will see some resemblance to me as I was some thirty years ago. That picture was taken before I was sent to prison.”

Again he lifted a gloved hand.

“You were further thinking,” he went on, “that my royalties, while tolerable enough, are hardly sufficient to pay for—” He pointed to the car outside. “You are quite right. When I went to prison I had a passable sum of money. A beneficent rate of interest, while I was unable to spend any of the money, brought it up to something like a fortune; and I contrived to add to it by literary work while I was in prison. That is the difference between financiers and authors. Financiers make money and then go to prison. Authors go to prison and then make money. Mr. Atkinson, I hope you will excuse us. Mr. Stevens; please come with me.”

He held open the door; and Stevens, in dumb astonishment, followed him out. The chauffeur opened the door of the car.

“Get in,” said Cross.

“Where are we going?”

“I have not the slightest idea,” said Cross. “Drive anywhere, Henry.”

The car hummed softly. It was warm in the grey-upholstered back of the limousine. Cross sat in one corner, regarding his guest intently. Over his face had come the same expression of savagery and cynicism, tempered with something Stevens could not read. He gravely took out a cigar-case and tendered it. Stevens, whose nerves needed tobacco badly, accepted one.