The Burning Court (20 page)

“But, good God, Captain! You don’t suggest that this woman, after she had given Miles a cup of arsenic, went out through the secret door and retired to one of the coffins in the crypt?”

“ ‘Suggest.’ ‘Suggest,’ ” snapped the other. “No; I’m not crazy enough for that. But I say this. I say that last night, while you four were taking two hours to open up that vault, the woman might have got in there and pulled the body out—so that it’s somewhere in the passage between the crypt and the house.” He raised his hand. “Don’t say she wouldn’t have had the strength.” He considered, and went on with an indulgent light of reminiscence in his eye, “My old dad was a son-of-a-gun.”

Lucy blinked at him. “We’re not discussing questions of heredity,” she said. “Why the change of subject?”

“He was born in Cork,” said Brennan, “and he came out to this country in ’81. He was six feet three inches tall. When he sang the ‘Shan Van Voght’ in Rafferty’s saloon, you could hear him from Second Street to Independence Hall. Well, sir, he used to get drunk every Saturday night, and I
mean
drunk. When he came home he was lucky if he got past the hat rack in the hall before he keeled over. He was a dead weight. And yet my mother—who wasn’t a big woman, mind you—always got him to bed.” Brennan paused, and added in a brisk tone: “That’s what I meant. Does it sound wild?”

“Yes,” said Stevens, briefly.

“Let’s look at the physical side of it. Never mind who was guilty, just at present. Say it was anybody. But, granting there was a way into that crypt, would it have been hard to open the coffin? That is, they don’t solder or weld the lid on, do they?”

“No,” the other was forced to admit. “This was a wooden coffin, anyhow. There are just two automatic bolts down through the sides. But, though it doesn’t take long, it takes a whale of a lot of strength to lift the catch. A female shot-putter or discus-thrower might have managed it.”

“I never said the murderer mightn’t have had an accomplice. You’re pretty husky yourself.—What about the old man? Was he big?”

Lucy shook her head. The puzzled look which had been in her eyes a while ago had returned. “No. He was rather small. Five feet six at the most; rather under that, I should say. He wasn’t much taller than I am.”

“Heavy?”

“No. He wasn’t well, you know. While he was getting better, the doctor used to make him weigh himself on one of those bathroom scales, and it used to make Uncle Miles furious. He was all skin and bones; he weighed 109, if I can remember correctly.”

“Then—” said Brennan, and stopped. Miss Corbett had come into the room, with Mark, eager to hear.

The nurse still had her coat on, but she had removed her hat. Stevens was so obsessed with this notion of the color of the hair that he half hoped to see a brunette like Lucy or Edith; but her hair was a pale and somewhat washed-out yellow, in contrast with the strong square face and level brown eyes. Hers would have been a very attractive face if it had not been for an almost complete lack of animation except the animation of duty or annoyance. With some ceremony Brennan installed her in a chair.

“Miss Corbett? Good. Yesterday afternoon a man from our department, Detective Partridge, came round to see you, didn’t he? And you gave him a statement.”

“I answered his questions.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean,” said Brennan, looking at her quickly. He got after his papers again. “You said that on the evening of Saturday, April 8th, at some time between six and eleven o’clock, a two-ounce bottle of quarter-grain morphia tablets had been taken out of your room.”

“So it
was
morphia!—” said Mark.

“Let me handle this, please,” snapped Brennan. “When you found the bottle gone, who did you think had taken it?”

“I thought at first that Mr. Despard had taken it. Mr. Miles Despard. He was always wanting morphia, but naturally Doctor Baker wouldn’t give it to him. Once I found him in my room, looking for it. That was why I thought it must have been Mr. Despard.”

“What did you do when you found the bottle gone?”

“I looked for it,” said the nurse, practically, as though she found the dullness of man somewhat excessive. “I spoke to Miss Despard about it, but I didn’t say much because I believed Mr. Despard had taken it and I could make him give it back to me. He swore he hadn’t, though.—And there wasn’t much time to do anything. The bottle was returned on the night afterwards.”

“Had anything been taken from it?”

“Yes. Three quarter-grain tablets.”

“Speaking from a legal point of view,” interposed Mark, “I should call this irrelevant, incompetent, and immaterial. Why the devil are all of you harping so much on that morphine? There’s no suggestion that Uncle Miles was poisoned with it, is there? And three quarter-grain tablets wouldn’t have hurt even him.”

Brennan looked briefly over his shoulder. “I think we’ll get down to the point of it, though. Miss Corbett, I’d like you to tell me what you told the sergeant yesterday—about how the bottle was returned and what you saw on that Sunday night, the 9th of April.”

She nodded.

“It was about eight o’clock in the evening. I had just gone into the bathroom at the end of the hall upstairs. From the bathroom door you can see straight down the hall past Mr. Despard’s door, and the table outside it. There is a light there. I wasn’t in the bathroom longer than two minutes. When I opened the bathroom door again I looked down the hall, and there was a person just going
away from Mr. Despard’s door towards the staircase. I could see that there was something on the table now, although I couldn’t tell what it was at that distance. There had been nothing on the table before. When I got there I saw that it was the two-ounce bottle, which had been returned.”

“Who was the person you saw coming away from the table?”

“It was Mrs. Stevens,” said the nurse.

Hitherto her manner had been as impersonal as that of a constable giving evidence before a magistrate, rattling through to get a duty done. Now she turned to Stevens and spoke with grave intensity.

“I’m sorry. I tried to see you or your wife this morning, but my dear friend, Mr. Ogden Despard, butted in. I wanted to tell you what I actually
had
said to that numbskull of a policeman yesterday. He tried to get me to say I had really seen Mrs. Stevens putting the bottle on the table. And that’s one kind of thing I won’t stand for.”

There was a twinkle in Brennan’s eye, but it was not a twinkle of amusement. “Now, now, that’s very commendable. But what else could you think? Who else could it have been?”

“I still don’t know. It might have been Mr. Despard.”

“But what did you do? Didn’t you speak to Mrs. Stevens about it?”

“I couldn’t. She was already downstairs and out of the house, and they were off to New York. She had come up that night to say good-bye. I thought I would just wait and see.”

“Yes; and then?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to stand for any more of
that
foolishness,” said Miss Corbett, raising her pale eyebrows. “Whoever was doing it. So I simply locked up my room whenever I wasn’t in it. I bolted the door communicating with Mr. Despard’s room on my side. The door of my room giving
on the hall was harder, because it’s a common type of lock. But my father happens to be a locksmith, and I know a few things. I simply took the lock apart and altered it. Houdini himself couldn’t have got in unless I had shown him how to manipulate the key. I wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble, but Mrs. Stevens turned up unexpectedly on the following Wednesday afternoon, and that was to be my evening out——”

“The afternoon of the day Miles Despard was murdered?”

“The afternoon before Mr. Despard died,” she said sharply. “And by that time I’d begun to think——”

“Now,”
interposed Brennan, and turned to Mark, “now we’re coming to it. Now you’re going to see why I’m plugging away at these questions. Did Mrs. Stevens ever” —he looked at his notes— “did Mrs. Stevens ever say anything to you about poisons in general?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“She asked me where she could buy arsenic.”

There was a thick, eerie silence in the room. Stevens was conscious of eyes turned on him, of a ring of eyes. Miss Corbett’s forehead showed reddish and rather spotted; but her own eyes faced him levelly and determinedly. He could hear her breathing. Brennan’s eyes were catlike and bland as he looked over his shoulder.

“That’s a strong accusation,” Brennan suggested.

“It’s not an accusation! It’s not! It’s only——”

“And it ought to be supported,” Brennan pursued; “that is, if it can be. Did anybody else hear her say that to you?”

The nurse moved her head. “Yes. Mrs. Despard did.”

“Is that true, Mrs. Despard?”

Lucy hesitated, opened her mouth, hesitated, and then faced them.

“Yes, it is,” replied Lucy.

Stevens, his palms pressed flat against the arms of the chair, was conscious of the great heat in this room and also of the ring of eyes. He noticed in a detached way that the ring of eyes had been increased by another pair. Over in the gloom by the door he saw now the jeering, calm stare and down-pulled mouth of Ogden Despard.

Brennan leaned across the top of Miss Corbett’s chair, his arm along the back of it, and spoke to Lucy.

“I’ve been trying to follow the way your mind was working, Mrs. Despard,” he said. “Your face showed a whole lot. When I first sprung this on you, you looked surprised. But you began to think about Mrs. Stevens. And the more you thought, the more kept occurring to you. You got mad because it did occur to you, but you couldn’t keep it out. Then somebody brought up the point about that masquerade dress, and how nobody could have copied it in such a short time. That seemed to settle things for you. And you thought Mrs. Stevens couldn’t have had anything to do with it. But now you’re not so sure. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“I—” said Lucy. She took a few quick steps up and down the room; then she folded her arms. “Oh, this is ridiculous! How should I know? You speak to him, Ted.”

“Don’t worry. I will,” said the other. “Am I allowed to cross-examine, Captain?” It was sheer bravado. He had not a thought in his head.

“As soon as you have something to cross-examine about,” said Brennan. “Let’s get back to it, Miss Corbett. When did Mrs. Stevens ask you where she could buy arsenic?”

“About three weeks ago. On a Sunday afternoon, I think it was.”

“Tell us what happened. Let’s have the whole story.”

“Mrs. Stevens and Mrs. Despard and I were sitting in the dining-room. We were sitting in front of a log fire, because it was the end of March and the weather was blowy. We were eating buttered toast with cinnamon on it. There was a case in the papers just then, some murder case in California, and we were talking about it. Then we started to talk about murders. Mrs. Despard was asking me about poisons——”

“You mean Mrs. Stevens,” said Brennan.

“No, I don’t,” retorted the other, turning on him sharply. “I mean Mrs. Despard there. You ask her. Mrs. Stevens did not say one word the whole time. Oh, except once. I was telling them how one of my first cases as a probationer was when a man was brought into the hospital after he had drunk strychnine, and how he acted; and Mrs. Stevens asked whether I thought he suffered much pain.”

“Ah, that’s what I wanted to know. What was her manner then? How did she look then?”

“She looked beautiful.”

Brennan stared in annoyance, glanced at his notes, and up again. “What kind of an answer is that? You don’t seem to see what I’m getting at. Beautiful. What do you mean by that?”

“That’s exactly what I do mean. She— May I speak frankly?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“She looked,” said the witness, in a cold and steady voice, “like a woman suffering from sexual excitement.”

A cold shock of rage went through Stevens and spread inside him like an explosion or like strong liquor. But he continued to look steadily at her.

“Just a minute,” he interposed. “That’s going a little too far. Miss Corbett, would you mind giving us your impression of a woman suffering from sexual excitement?”

“Here!” snapped Brennan, while a dull color went over the nurse’s face and made it appear shiny. “Go easy with that stuff! Try to act like a gentleman. You’ve got no reason to go and insult her. She was only trying——”

“I didn’t mean to insult her. If I did, I’m sorry. All I mean is that a term like that doesn’t mean anything; or rather that you can make it mean anything you like. And I’d like to know what this does mean. Accuse all you want to, but don’t turn this thing into a damned psychologist’s case-book. Let’s have short words, Miss Corbett. Do you mean you think my wife is a homicidal maniac?”

“That’s the stuff,” said Mark Despard, coming to the defence with angry bewilderment. “I don’t quite understand what’s going on here. Look, Captain: if you think you have a case against Marie Stevens, why are you talking to us? Why don’t you see
her?
Ted, why don’t you ring up Marie and ask her to come up here and answer all this for herself?”

A new voice spoke.

“Yes,” it said. “Oh yes. Ask him. Ask him why he doesn’t.”

From the doorway Ogden Despard sauntered forward, nodding so deeply that his long chin went down to his collar. He had not removed the camel’s hair coat or changed his clothes. He surveyed Stevens with an expression which was too judicial to be called pleasure, but he was obviously enjoying himself so much that his personality dominated this room.

“If you don’t mind, Brennan,” he remarked, “I’ll ask this fellow a few questions. It’ll be to your advantage, because I guarantee to tie him up into knots in about a minute.—Well, Stevens,
why
don’t you call her up?”

He waited, like one listening for the answer of a child. Stevens had to get a grip on himself in order to conceal his rage. He didn’t mind Brennan; Brennan was a good fellow. But Ogden was an altogether different proposition.

“You see he doesn’t answer,” said Ogden. “So I see I’ll have to make him answer. It’s because she’s not there, isn’t it? She ran away, didn’t she? She’s not there this morning, is she?”