The Burning Court (30 page)

Cross, savoring the situation, remained poised over the radio.

“I was wondering,” he said, “when the obviously distracted state of this company would allow it to turn for assistance to a cooler mind and a more developed intelligence. Mrs. Despard, I do not think you had better appeal to me. Appealing to me seems to have become a general habit. The unfortunate truth, Mrs. Despard, is that your husband did plan the murder with Miss Corbett, and that he did cover it up afterwards. He is accessory before and after the fact; but there is one thing to be said in his favor. He had nothing to do with the attempt to throw suspicion on
you.
He never knew of it—until it was done. That was why he tried to shift suspicion off you again, and in doing so he confused, complicated, and made nonsensical a perfectly ordinary murder case.

“Let us consider the matter esthetically. If you are unable to consider it esthetically, pray try to consider it less like howling asses. The most significant point in this case—the point which betrays it—is the curious way in which two murderers, two intelligences, seemed to be pulling against each other.

“As originally planned, it had no flourishes. Mark Despard and his lady of the blunt speech had determined to kill Miles Despard because Mark Despard needed the money. But the victim was to die, apparently, from natural causes. Who could question it? Why should it be anything else? Miles was dying of gastro-enteritis in any case; the family doctor was of little curiosity and moss-grown wits; there could be small chance of any suspicion whatever. There was to be no revealing silver cup, containing arsenic, left so conveniently in a cupboard along with a dead cat and—later—a book on witchcraft.

“That was the simple plan conceived by Mark Despard—a death from natural causes. But it did not satisfy Miss Myra Corbett. No. She not only wanted Miles Despard out of the way; she particularly wanted Mrs. Lucy Despard out of the way as well. It is not unknown, I believe, for a paramour to cherish such sentiments towards her lover’s wife. If Miles died, it is obvious that it must be murder and that Lucy Despard must be convicted of that murder.

“To execute such a plan, without the knowledge of Mark, was not difficult. From the beginning of this case it was apparent that the mysterious woman in the Brinvilliers dress came from this house. I have declared to my friend Stevens that I place no particular reliance on alibis. But, in order to believe in the guilt of Mrs. Despard or Miss Edith Despard, we should have been compelled to discredit corporate alibis of such gigantic dimensions that even my suspicions turned pale. The masquerader in the Brinvilliers dress, was not, then, either of them. But who? As some one has shrewdly pointed out,
somebody
had to make a duplicate of that dress. It could not have been an outsider. In the first place, it was not known outside the house that Mrs. Despard planned to make a dress on the model of the picture in the gallery; in the second place, it was impossible that an outsider should have been able to study that same picture in order
also
to make a copy good enough for the purpose of deceiving Mrs. Henderson. But if a painstaking second copy were in the process of being made, and made in absolute secrecy, there is one thing that the maker most certainly had to do…”

“Well?” Stevens heard himself demanding.

“She had to keep her room locked up,” replied Cross.

“It is true,” he continued affably, “that—with miraculous good fortune—an excuse was supplied to her for doing this. An excuse was supplied when Mrs. Stevens stole a bottle of morphia tablets from her room on Saturday night, and returned it on Sunday. It was not (I think we have heard) until Monday that Lucy Despard decided to make a Brinvilliers costume and wear it to the masquerade. Henceforward Myra Corbett had her excuse for a locked room. For the rest, it was easy. She wears a dress like that of Mrs. Despard; she wears a mask; she even, I suspect, wears a wig. Not only is it of small consequence whether she is seen, but she wants to be seen.

“One precaution, however, must be taken. She must put through a phone call to the house where the masquerade is being held, intending to lure Mrs. Despard away—not only to lure her away, but to lure her to this house. Thereby will be achieved complete damnation beyond alibi.

“Our murderess comes to this house and puts on her disguise. She knows that Mrs. Henderson will be in this sun porch at eleven o’clock to listen to the Soothing Hour. She can, at her leisure, make that wine-and-egg mixture in the kitchen, because there is nobody there to see her: Mrs. Henderson is in the stone house beside the crypt. It is the sort of drink, medicinally, which she can force him to accept. She can get to his room before eleven. Her costume will not surprise Miles; he knows there is a masquerade that night, even if he had not been aware she was invited. Even the wig will rouse no curiosity, because it is a masquerade.

“Nevertheless, she wishes to be observed—hence the chink in the curtain. I call your attention to one point which, from the first, should have resolved any doubts. Kindly examine this sun porch. Mrs. Henderson was sitting here by the radio, where I am, at one end of the room. Completely at the other end, behind a closed door with a muffling curtain, is Miles’s room. Finally, a radio is playing. Yet our witness distinctly heard a woman’s voice speaking in that room. It is conceivable that a murderess would speak in a low tone. It is even conceivable that she might speak in an ordinary tone. But it is not conceivable that she would speak with such shattering and obvious loudness—while handing a poison-cup to her victim—unless she deliberately wished to call attention to her presence. I leave you to imagine why she wished to call attention to it.

“The one flaw in the calculation, of course, was that extra chink by which she was seen in a mirror. But her work was over by that time. She had given her victim the drink, of which he did not take all. She fed the dregs to a convenient cat. She placed the cup conspicuously on the floor of a wardrobe—all the actions of a woman wishing deliberately to call attention to murder, to underline it in the heaviest pencilling. I also call your attention to the point that no person, wishing it to be believed that a man had died of natural causes, would have given so enormous a dose of arsenic—a dose of which two grains remained in the very dregs of the cup.

“Very well. Miles Despard has no suspicion that he is poisoned. He pushes the bureau back to its original position on the other wall; he hangs up the picture again and replaces the chair. It is this exertion which brings on so quickly the shattering cramps and renders him helpless in so short a time. He was cut off in the house; he could reach nobody.

“At past two o’clock Mark Despard returns—to find his uncle dying, as he had expected. But also to find (with, I should suspect, no small degree of horror) plain evidences of murder blazoned round the room like bloodstains. I here wish to point out that all the evidence of Miles’s weird and supernatural actions that night—his babbling sinister words to Mark, his request that he be buried in a wooden coffin, even the finding of the string tied with nine knots under his pillow—rest on the testimony of one person—Mark Despard. Did anybody else hear him ask for a wooden coffin? Did anybody else, at that point, see the string with nine knots? No; those things were afterthoughts. Thus:

“Mark Despard had good reason to feel sweat and panic. He had good reason to hide the glass and the cup, and to bury the cat’s body deep. But there was worse. On the following morning he learned from Mrs. Henderson that a woman—in a dress like the one his wife had been wearing—was seen giving the poison-cup to Miles. He knew now that his lady-friend and ally had deliberately planned to throw the blame on his wife. And he did not know what to do. First he swore Mrs. Henderson to secrecy, with, I venture to say, complicated and frightful oaths. …”

Cross paused, and glanced at Mrs. Henderson. The woman, who was oily white, nodded.

“I can’t be saved,” she answered. “But him”—she stabbed her finger at Brennan—“him, with his soft soap, he got me to tell it.”

“First, however,” Cross continued, “he had to make sure that these really were murder intimations, and that either the silver cup or the glass actually contained poison. When he received the chemist’s report, he was sure. But there was still worse. It has been constantly reported how, from the very beginning of the case, a formless but insistent report has everywhere been circulated that this was murder—a report dating from the day of Miles Despard’s death. Mark could not stop this rumour. Sooner or later (he realized this on Thursday, the day after the death) such a rumour must culminate in exhumation. I think we know who started the rumour.

“That must be prevented. The body must disappear with the tell-tale arsenic in the stomach. The funeral was to be on Saturday. But, up to and including the time of the funeral, he had no opportunity for disposing of it without suspicion; first, because officialdom was in charge; second and more important, because his ever-watchful ally was on guard, and would have prevented it. If he moved, he had to move secretly.

“The course pursued by Myra Corbett, I concede, had been extremely ingenious. She might, it is true, have announced immediately after the death of her patient that she believed he had been poisoned; she might have told the doctor to order a post-mortem immediately. But this was far, far too dangerous. She could not afford to be in the limelight in any way whatever. It was possible and even probable that her past connection with Mark might have been dug up. It was even possible that some one might inquire how she came to figure in the business. From her safe position as X, as a nurse, as an automaton, publicity might turn her into something else. The safest course was to let Miles be buried, while she declared to everyone how he died a natural death… and then let secret channels, let the evidence she had planted, do its work in the course of a month or so. She would be safe, because by that time she would be inconspicuous.

“And now it becomes pull-baker, pull-devil, pull-murderer. Mark turned over plans of his own. It is probable that the idea was first put into his head by the story, which he heard on Thursday morning, about a woman ‘walking through a wall.’ What he actually thought of this we shall not know until he is caught. But it gave him his idea, along with the remembrance of a book on witchcraft which Miles had once read, and which seems to have impressed Miles enormously—especially the chapter concerning the Non-Dead. So Mark, at this moment bent on befogging the issue as much as possible, first told his story about finding under Miles’s pillow a string tied with nine knots, and also tried out tentatively the ‘walking through the wall’ story on a friend of his, Edward Stevens.
He threw all this dust to cover up the one really vital and essential part of his scheme, his unsupported statement that Miles had asked to be buried in a wooden coffin.

“An unusual request, surely. One that must arouse suspicion on merely human grounds; but we have the word of King James the First that, ‘such convicted of the horreid cryme of witchcraft are thought to be commonlie fond of wood or stone, but Steele they cannot abide’; and this afforded excellent camouflage——”

Partington got up out of his chair.

“Camouflage for what?” he demanded, stung out of his stolidity. “If Mark stole that body out of the crypt, how did he do it? What difference did it make whether the coffin was steel or wood?”

“Because it could be more easily moved,” said Cross, impatiently. “Even for a man of Mark Despard’s enormous physical strength, a steel coffin would have been too much.”

“Moved?” said Partington.

“Let me now enumerate a few facts concerning the body and the crypt. These are (1) the coffin, although its two bolts require strength, can be opened instantly; (2) Miles Despard was a very tiny and light man who weighed only one hundred and nine pounds; (3) at the foot of the steps leading down into the crypt, blocking any view inside, is a rotted wooden door which you on your Friday night investigation found closed; (4) in the crypt are two enormous marble urns, stuffed with flowers——”

Stevens interrupted, with a vivid picture of the place in his mind.

“Look here,” he protested, “if you’re going to say the body was doubled up in one of those urns, it won’t work. We looked in them.”

“If those who have asked my assistance,” Cross said, testily, drawn out of his relish at telling the story, “would kindly refrain from interrupting until I have explained, I think I can make clear what I do mean.

“And the last point, which points irrefutably to the truth, is (5) that, when you penetrated into the crypt on Friday night, you noticed a great many scattered flowers lying on the floor under the urns. Why were those flowers on the floor? They came, obviously, from the urns. But funerals are usually characterized by neatness, and it is not reasonable to suppose that they were flung there during any rioting at the funeral itself.

“Now let us examine what happened at the funeral, on the afternoon of Saturday, April 15th. Mark Despard told you about it, and he gave (substantially) quite a correct account. He had to do so, since it could be confirmed by disinterested witnesses. But kindly recall what happened.

“By his own admission, he was the last to leave the crypt. All the others had gone—except the parson, whom Mark had detained. But was the parson actually in the crypt? No; again by Mark’s own confession; for no human being cares to stand the air of that crypt longer than necessary. The parson was waiting up the stairs, near the top where he could get air. Between him and the crypt was a wooden door shutting off his view. Meanwhile, Mark had remained behind on the pretext of gathering of some
iron
candle-brackets. He states that he remained behind not much longer than a minute; and I see no reason to doubt him. Sixty seconds would suffice for what he had to do. If you will take the trouble to consult your watch, and execute in pantomime the following movements, you will see that the time is sufficient. Thus:

“He went through the following movements. He slid out the coffin; he drew the bolts; he picked up the body and walked across the crypt with it; he thrust the body, doubled up, into one of the urns; he relocked the coffin and returned it to the niche. Any noises he might have made—a bump, a metallic rasp of a bolt—would have been easily disguised to the ear of the parson under the guise of handling iron brackets. The body was now covered by a vast mass of flowers. The only trace he left to anyone looking into the crypt was (necessarily) some spilled flowers on the floor.