The Burning Court (28 page)

“I’m not so sure of that,” observed Marie.
“I’m
willing to antagonize him. He—well, he tried to make up to me, once, in a more or less subtle way; and he seemed completely staggered that I wasn’t in the least impressed.”

“Just a minute,” said Lucy. “That’s not all. Edith and I washed his face and brought him round; he was beaten clear insensible, you see. As soon as Ogden could get on his feet he called us all together and said he had something to tell us. He took the room next to the one Mark was in, so Mark could hear. … I—I don’t know how much you’ve heard about Tom Partington’s case. Doctor Partington. He used to be engaged to Edith. But it was discovered that he performed an abortion, and he only escaped criminal prosecution by getting out of the country. Edith always believed, or said she believed, that the girl was his mistress. As a matter of fact, I don’t think Edith ever really cared for him. Edith’s a grand person, but she’s cold, cold as ice; and I believe she was only getting married for the show of the thing. So she broke it off because of this girl—Jeannette White. … But Ogden told the truth today. The girl wasn’t Tom Partington’s mistress. She was
Mark
’
s
.”

After a pause Lucy added, in the same colorless voice: “Tom was Mark’s best friend, and yet Mark never told him, never told anybody else. He let Edith go on thinking what she did think. Tom Partington never knew who the man was, for the girl wouldn’t tell. So Mark kept quiet in spite of how much Tom cared for Edith. You see, Mark was engaged to me at the time, and he was afraid to speak.”

Stevens paced up and down the kitchen. He thought: Affairs are too much tangled and incomprehensible in this world. If Mark Despard did that, he did a meaner thing than Ogden has ever done; and yet it does not particularly lower Mark in my opinion; for to me Mark will always remain likable, and Ogden, to put it civilly, something else altogether. He found, with some surprise, that Marie felt the same way.

“So Ogden,” said Marie, with contempt, “played tattle-tale.”

“That’s not the point,” interposed Stevens. “How did Partington take it? Was he there?”

“Oh yes,” Lucy replied, nodding with a dry, bright glaze in her eyes. “And that wasn’t so bad. It didn’t seem to bother him greatly. He just shrugged his shoulders—and spoke pretty sensibly. He said ten years was too long a time to bother over anything much, particularly a love-affair. He said that by this time he was more in love with liquor than he could be with any woman. No, it wasn’t Tom that made the trouble. It was I. I said some pretty awful things. I also told Mark I never wanted to see him again, and in that quiet, solemn way of his he took me at my word.”

“But what on earth for?” cried Marie, opening her eyes. It surprised her husband that this Dresden-china doll, now wearing her spiritual expression again, could go so practically to the point. “I mean, why did you have to say that? After all, it can’t be because he—did things to this girl ten years ago. Lucy dear, you find me a man who hasn’t done that, and he’ll be rather awful, won’t he? And it was ten years ago. What’s more, it can’t be because he let this Mr. Partington down so badly. That’s very wrong and terrible, no doubt; agreed; but, after all, it only showed Mark loved you, didn’t it? And that’s all
I’d
care about.”

Stevens had prepared a drink for Lucy, who took it with eagerness. She hesitated over it, put it down, and the color in her face grew higher.

“Because I’m afraid,” she said, “he’s been seeing the girl again since.”

“The same girl? Jeannette White?”

“The same girl.”

“And is Ogden,” asked Stevens, bitterly—“is Ogden, as usual, the source of information? Personally, I think Ogden must be unhinged. He’s had to conceal his malice for so long, under a sort of good-fellowly and pleasant unpleasantness, that, now he’s come into his uncle’s money, it’s gone to his head.”

Lucy fixed her eyes steadily on him. “You remember, Ted, the mysterious phone call which almost took me away from the dance at St. Davids, so that except for a freak of luck I shouldn’t have had an alibi? That call was anonymous——”

“Ogden’s touch is discernible again.”

“Yes, I think it was Ogden.” She took up the glass. “That’s why I almost obeyed it. Whatever else Ogden is, he’s invariably
accurate.
That call said that Mark was tied up again with his ‘old flame, Jeannette White.’ You see, at that time I hadn’t heard—or at least I couldn’t remember—the name of the girl in the Partington scandal; I never connected the two. But it was a woman. And Mark… doesn’t seem to care much about me any longer.”

She got the words out with difficulty. Then she emptied her glass very quickly, and remained staring at the opposite wall.

“The call said that on that very night, using the convenience of masks so that I shouldn’t know where he was, Mark was going back to our house and see this girl. In our own
house.
The call said that, if I would take fifteen minutes out and drive to Crispen, I could see for myself. At first I didn’t believe it. Then I looked all over the house where the masquerade was being held, and I didn’t see Mark. (As a matter of fact, he was playing billiards in a room at the back of the house with two friends of ours; I found that out later.) I started to go out; then I thought the whole thing was ridiculous, and I came back. But then, this afternoon, when Ogden came out with the name of Jeannette White as being the girl in the Partington scandal, I—I——”

“But are you sure it’s true?” demanded Stevens. “If Ogden’s phone call was wrong that night, why shouldn’t this accusation be wrong?”

“Because Mark admitted it. And now he’s gone. Ted, you’ve got to find him! It isn’t for me; it’s for his own sake. When Captain Brennan learns Mark’s gone, he’s likely to think all sorts of things that haven’t anything to do with this case.”

“Doesn’t Brennan know it yet?”

“No. He went out a while ago, and came back with an odd little man in an awful fur coat, who’s most amusing, but I’m not in the mood for being amused. Captain Brennan asked me whether I’d mind having the man around, because he says this man—Croft or Cross I think his name is—knows criminals’ minds as he knows the palm of his hand. They went down into the crypt, and when they came up again Captain Brennan was red in the face and this little man was laughing fit to burst. All I could gather was that they didn’t find a secret passage there. I asked Joe Henderson what they were doing, and… You know that old wooden door at the foot of the stairs into the crypt, that won’t quite close?”

“Yes. Well?”

“Cross was moving that back and forth, Joe says, and laughing again. I don’t know what’s up, but it scares me. Then they went up to the sun porch—you know, with the glass door looking into Uncle Miles’s room. They fiddled with the curtain, and sighted through it, and had a fine time of one sort or another. Have you any idea what they meant?”

“No. But,” said Stevens, “there’s something else on your mind, Lucy. This isn’t all. What else is worrying you?”

Lucy’s jaw became set.

“It doesn’t worry me, exactly,” she responded, with such rapidity as to be almost incoherent. “That is, it might be in any house. Captain Brennan admitted that himself, when he found it; it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. All the same, it would worry us horribly if we hadn’t known we all had perfectly good alibis for Wednesday night. The fact is, not very long after you left, Ted, Captain Brennan found arsenic in the house.”

“Arsenic! Good God! Where?”

“In the kitchen. I could have told him myself it was there, if I’d remembered it. But I had no reason or occasion to think of it, had I? Nobody so much as mentioned arsenic until today. …”

“Who bought it, Lucy?”

“Edith bought it. For the rats. But she’d forgotten all about it.”

There was a silence. Lucy again tried to drain an empty glass. With a little shiver, Marie went over and opened the back door.

“The wind has changed,” she said; “there’s going to be another storm tonight.”

There was another storm that night, while Stevens endlessly drove round Philadelphia in search of Mark. Mark might not necessarily have gone into town, of course; but he had not taken a car or packed a bag. He might have gone anywhere. Stevens’s first belief, that he had merely reached a point of bedevilment beyond his nerves’ capacity and had, therefore, gone on a spree, changed to uneasiness when there was no trace of him at his clubs, at his office, or any usual haunt.

Wet and dispirited, Stevens returned late to Crispen. It had been arranged that Cross should spend the night at his cottage; but he did not see Cross until nearly midnight. He went first to Despard Park, giving Lucy false reassurances about Mark. The house was very quiet, and Lucy seemed the only one still up. When Stevens went back to his own house, he found Cross and Brennan in the former’s limousine, just outside.

“Have you—?” he asked.

Brennan seemed rather gloomy than otherwise. “Yes, I think we know the murderer,” Brennan answered. “There’s one more thing I’ve got to verify; I’m going in to town to do it now. And then… yes, I’m afraid it’ll be all up.”

“Although in general,” said Cross, sticking his neck out of the car, “I deplore these humanitarian notions, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the study of crime, this time I cannot agree with my foxy friend. This, sir, is an ugly business, a damned ugly and unpleasant business, and I shall not be sorry to see the guilty person electrocuted. Mr. Stevens, I regret to say that I shall be unable to avail myself of your hospitality tonight, much as I am obliged for the invitation to spend it under your roof. I must continue with Brennan and prove my case. However, I promise you a solution. If you and your good lady would care to call at Despard Park tomorrow afternoon at two o’clock precisely, I shall introduce you to the murderer.—Henry, forward. Step on her tail.”

Marie, she confessed, was not sorry Cross could not remain there for the night. “He’s been very nice, and I’m terribly grateful to him,” she said, “but there’s something creepy about him. He seems to know exactly what you’re thinking about.”

Though they went to bed at midnight, and though he had had no sleep the night before, Stevens could not close his eyes; he was too strung-up and over-tired. The clock in the bedroom ticked loudly. Thunder was incessant for the first part of the night, and there seemed to be an unusual noise and disturbance of cats round the house. Marie fell into an uneasy doze; towards two o’clock she was stirring and muttering in her sleep, and he turned on the bedside lamp, intending to wake her if she wandered into a nightmare. She was pale, her dark-gold hair spread out on the pillow. Whether at the light, or the rain, or the congested weather, the noise of cats seemed to have come in close round the house. He looked round for something to throw, but he could find nothing except an empty jar of cold cream or something like it in the drawer of Marie’s dressing-table. When he opened the window and threw a missile for the second time that day, he was rewarded by a squall of such almost human savagery that he closed the window. He fell into a troubled doze himself about three o’clock, and did not awake until he heard church bells on the following Sunday morning.

When they set out for Despard Park just before two o’clock, they dressed as carefully as though for church. It was a rather heavy spring day, with the sun behind clouds, yet of warmth and kindliness. A Sunday hush was on Crispen and on the Park when they walked up through it.

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.