The Burning Court (9 page)

Partington regarded him without anger. “I’m not questioning your word, my friend. But don’t make too much of it, that’s all. If the body-snatchers didn’t get through that way, they got through some other way.”

Mark spoke with slow reasonableness. “Granite walls. Granite roof. Granite floor.” He stamped on it. “There’s no other way in; it’s all granite blocks set together. Were you thinking of a secret passage, on something like that? We’ll look, but I’m dead sure there isn’t one.”

“May I ask,” said Partington, “just what you think did happen here? Do you think your Uncle Miles got up out of his coffin and left the crypt?”

“Or do you think,” said Henderson, with peevish timidity, “that somebody might have taken his body and put it in one of the other coffins?”

“I should think it highly unlikely,” said Partington; “because in that case your problem is just as bad. How did somebody get in here to do it, and then get out again?” He reflected. “Unless, of course, the body was somehow stolen between the time the coffin was put in that niche and the time the crypt was sealed up?”

Mark shook his head. “That’s decidedly out. The actual burial service—that ‘dust-to-dust’ business—was read in here by the minister, with a whole crowd of people in the place. Afterwards we all went up the steps.”

“Who was the last person out of the crypt?”

“
I
was,” said Mark sardonically. “I had to blow out the candles they were using, and gather up the iron standing-brackets the candles were in. But, since the whole process took the remarkable space of one minute, and since the saintly pastor of St. Peter’s Church was waiting for me on the steps, I can assure you the dominie and I have no guilty secrets.”

“I didn’t mean that; I meant after you all left the crypt.”

“As soon as we were all out, Henderson and his assistants went to work and sealed it up. Of course, you can say that
they
had a guilty hand in it, but it happens that a number of people hung around, watching it being done.”

“Well, if that’s out, it’s out,” grunted Partington, and lifted one shoulder. “But don’t worry yourself about somebody playing crazy pranks, Mark. That body was stolen out of here, and has been destroyed since or hidden somewhere, for a damned good reason. Don’t you see what it was? It was to forestall just what we were going to do tonight. To my mind there’s no doubt your uncle was poisoned. And right now, unless the body is found, the murderer is in an impregnable position. Your doctor certified that Miles died of natural causes. Now the body disappears. You’re the lawyer and ought to know; but it strikes me that this is our old friend the
corpus delicti
again. Without the body, what proof have you that he didn’t die from natural causes? Strong contributory evidence, yes; but is it strong enough? You find two grains of arsenic in a milk-and-egg-and-port mixture, and the cup containing it was in his room. All right, what of it? Did anybody see him drink it? Can it be proved that he did drink it, or had anything to do with it? Wouldn’t he have mentioned it himself, if he had thought there was anything wrong? On the contrary, the only thing he was known to have taken into his own hands was a glass of milk you later proved to be harmless.”

“You ought to ’a’ been a lawyer yourself,” said Henderson, with no pleasant inflection.

Partington wheeled. “I’m telling you this to show you why the poisoner somehow got that body out of here. We’ve got to find out how it was done. Meanwhile, we have only an empty coffin——”

“Not completely empty,” said Stevens.

During this time he had remained staring into it with such intensity that he barely saw it at all. Now something that had been hidden by the color of the satin lining became plain to him. It lay along one side, about where the right hand of the dead man would have rested. He bent down, picked it up, and held it before them. It was a piece of ordinary wrapping-string, about a foot long, and tied at equal intervals into nine knots.

An hour later, when they stumbled up the steps into fresh air, they had satisfied themselves of two things:

1. There was no secret entrance, or any other way of getting in or out of the crypt.

2. The body was not still in the crypt, hidden in one of the other coffins. All the lower tiers of coffins they hauled out far enough for examination, and thoroughly examined each. Though it was impossible to open all of them, the state of undisturbed dust, rust, and tight-sealed lids showed that not one of them had been touched since it was put in there. Partington gave it up, going back to the house after another peg of whisky. But in an access of zeal Henderson and Stevens fetched ladders so that they could climb up and disturb the old Despards in their higher tiers: Mark uneasily refused to lend a hand at this breaking of bones. But here, where all things had a tendency to break under the touch, it was even more clear that the body had not been hidden. Finally, Mark even threw the flowers out of the urns and they tilted the urns over—without result. By this time they all knew the body was not in the crypt, for there was nowhere else it could have been. They were in a box of granite blocks. And the second of two possibilities was ruled out as soon as the first. Thus even in the unlikely event of some visitor creeping in here by nobody knew what way, removing the body from its coffin, hanging to the rows of coffins like a bat—an idea gruesome enough for Fuseli or Goya—while for some unaccountable reason he tried to put the body in another place, still there was no place for it to have been put.

Just before one o’clock, when all this was finished, all four had as much of the place as their noses and lungs would stand. When they came stumbling up, Henderson went into the trees beyond the path, and Stevens heard violent retching noises from his direction. They went into Henderson’s little stone house, into a small living-room, and turned on the lights; presently Henderson followed them, wiping his forehead, and quietly began brewing strong coffee. Then they sat round the table in the little gimcrack room, four grimy resurrectionists over their coffee, and did not speak. A clock on the mantelpiece, among framed photographs, said that it was ten minutes to one.

“Cheer up,” said Partington at length, though his own geniality was beginning to wear off, and his eyes looked heavy. He lit a cigarette with great deliberation. “We’ve got a problem, gentlemen; a good, round, interesting problem; and I suggest we try to solve it before Mark here begins brooding again. …”

“Why the devil do you keep harping on
my
brooding?” demanded Mark, snappishly. “It’s all you seem to talk about. I don’t know whether you want to advance solutions; you only want to convince us that we ought to doubt the evidence of our own eyes.” He looked up from his cup. “What do you think, Ted?”

“I wouldn’t like to tell you what I think,” Stevens answered, truthfully. He was remembering those cryptic remarks Marie had made: “You’re going to open a grave tonight, and my guess is that you’ll find nothing.” He knew that he must make himself as inconspicuous as possible, and keep a stiff face before the others, while he lived with several unpleasant possibilities. The best thing to do would be to keep Partington at his mundane theorizing. Stevens’s head felt queer, and the hot coffee burnt his throat. He tried to lean back easily: discovering a bulge in his side-pocket. Bulge? It was the tin funnel with which he had filled the lanterns; he remembered now that, just as he had finished filling the second lantern, they had begun to load him with a couple of picks and a sledge-hammer, and he had automatically thrust the funnel into his pocket. He touched it incuriously, before he remembered the strange and unaccountable quirk in Marie’s nature. She could never endure the sight of so ordinary an object as a tin funnel. Why, in the name of reason? He had heard of an antipathy to cats, or to certain flowers and jewels; but this… this was as meaningless as though some one were to shrink back at the sight of a coal-scuttle, or refuse to stay in the same room with a billiard-table.

At the same time he said, “Any theories, Doctor?”

“Not doctor, if you don’t mind,” said Partington, and examined his cigarette. “But it strikes me that this is our old friend the locked room again, only in a much more difficult form. We’ve not only got to explain how a murderer got in and out of a locked room without disturbing anything: because it wasn’t only a locked room. It was worse. It was a crypt built of granite, without even the advantage of a window; and closed up not by a door, but by a stone slab weighing nearly half a ton, six inches of soil and gravel, and a concrete-sealed pavement which one witness is willing to swear has not been disturbed.”

“That’s what I said,” declared Henderson, “and that’s what I meant.”

“Very well. I say that we’ve not only got to explain how the murderer got in and out, but
how the corpse did as well.
Very pretty. … Now, we’ve learned nearly all the tricks and dodges in this day and age,” said Partington, smiling round with broad scepticism. “We can at least pare it down by determining the only ways it could have been approached. There are four possibilities, and only four, to draw on. Two of these possibilities we can discard; subject, of course, to the examination of an architect. We can pretty well decide that there is no secret passage, and that the body is not now in the crypt. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Mark.

“That leaves us with two more. First: that, in spite of what Mr. Henderson says to the best of his own knowledge, and in spite of the fact that he and his wife slept within twenty feet of that pavement, somebody did manage to get in during the night, and replaced the whole thing undetectably.”

Henderson was so contemptuous of this that he did not even reply. He had withdrawn to a tall creaky rocking-chair with a wicker back, where he sat with his arms tight folded, rocking with such an even and determined vigor that the chair was moving away.

“Well—I don’t credit that much, myself,” Partington admitted. “And so we’re reduced to the last and only certainty—that the body was never put into the crypt at all.”

“Ah,” said Mark, drumming on the table. Then he added, “And yet I don’t believe that, either.”

“Nor me,” said Henderson. “Mr. Partington: I don’t like to keep on butting in, and seem to nag and raise hell with everything you say; but, I’m telling you that’s the worst idea you’ve had yet. It isn’t as if it was only me that said so. But, if you say he wasn’t put straight down in that place, you’ve got to accuse the undertaker and both his assistants; and honest, Mr. Partington, you know
that
ain’t likely, is it? Here’s how it was. Miss Edith told me to stand by the undertakers while they were doing the business, and not leave Mr. Miles’s body any time, case I was wanted for something. And I did.

“You see, nowadays they don’t put the body in the coffin and put the coffin in the parlor for people to go past and look at—the way they used to. They keep the body, embalmed, right on the bed until it’s time to bury it; then they put it in the coffin and close it up, and the pall-bearers take it downstairs. See? That’s what they done with Mr. Miles. Now, I was right in the room with ’em while they were putting it in the coffin. … I hadn’t left it much, anyway, by my orders; the Mrs. and I sat up all night with it, the night before the funeral. … Well, they put it in and screwed down the lid, and right away in came the pall-bearers, and
they
took over. They took it downstairs, with me following; and,” said Henderson with energy, seeking the acme of respectability, “there was judges and lawyers and doctors among the pall-bearers, and I hope you don’t think
they’d
do any funny business?

“Well, sir, they carried it right downstairs, and out the back, and out that path, and down to this place, and right down into—there.” He pointed. “The rest of us that didn’t go down into the place, we stood around at the top, listening to the preacher. Then the rest of ’em came up out of that place, and it was over. Right away Barry and McKelsie, my men, with young Tom Robinson helpin’ ’em, they started in to seal it up again; and as soon as I’d gone in and changed my clothes, I came out and directed it. And there you are.”

His rocking-chair gave a last emphatic squeak, moving in the direction of an ancient radio with a potted plant on top, and rocked more slowly.

“But, damn it,” cried Partington, “it’s got to be one thing or the other! You don’t believe in ghosts, do you?”

The creak slowed away to silence. “So help me Harry,” declared Henderson, slowly, “I believe I do.”

“Nonsense!”

Henderson frowned at the table, still hugging his arms. “Now, mind you,” he said, “I don’t care much whether there’s ghosts or not. I’m not afraid of ’em, if that’s what you mean, not if one was to walk in the room this minute. I’m not superstitious; and being superstitious is being afraid of ghosts.” He considered. “You know, I always remember what old Mr. Ballinger says to me, forty years ago, out in the part of Pennsylvania where I come from. Mr. Ballinger, he was ninety years old if he was a day; and he always wore an elegant plug hat; but there he was every day, out weeding his garden or working round the house like anybody else; and once it gave everybody a fit when we saw him right out on the roof of his house, sixty feet and more up on a sloped roof, fixing the tiles, in his shirt-sleeves and his plug hat—at ninety. Well, sir, there was an old graveyard next to his place, that wasn’t used any longer and that nobody paid any attention to. And when Mr. Ballinger wanted new paving for a part of his cellar, he just hops through the fence and takes some old gravestones. Yes, sir, that’s what he did.

“Well, I remember I was coming past his back yard, where he was digging, and I said: ‘Mr. Ballinger, ain’t you afraid something might happen to you, for taking them gravestones?’ So Mr. Ballinger he leans on his spade, and he spits about a pint of tobacco juice over one shoulder, and he says: ‘Joe,’ he says, ‘Joe, I ain’t a-skeered of any dead people, and don’t you be a-skeered of any dead people, either. It’s these
livin’
sons-of-bitches you want to watch out for.’ Yes, sir, that’s just what he said, and I never forgot it. ‘It’s these
livin’
sons-of-bitches you want to watch out for,’ he said. Yes, sir. If they’re dead, they can’t hurt you. Leastways, they can’t hurt me; that’s the way I figure it out. And as for whether there is or there isn’t any, I was hearin’ just the other night, on the radio, what Shakespeare said——”