The Burning Court (22 page)

But what took their attention was the panelling of the wall where the picture and the chair showed so uncompromisingly. Down the panelling, where a door would have been, were very faint bulges in the wood like the outlines of door-posts.

“You see?” said Mark, pointing. “I told you that the door there once led to another part of the house, which was destroyed by fire early in the eighteenth century. They filled it in with brick and panelled it over, but the doorposts were stone and you can still trace them.”

Brennan went over to it, studied the wall, and struck it with his fist.

“It seems solid enough,” he said, and stared round. “Damn it, Mr. Despard, if
this
won’t work—” He strode over to the glass door in the other wall, examining the curtain and taking measurements with his eye. “Is the curtain now just as it was when Mrs. Henderson looked through it?”

“Yes. I’ve been making experiments.”

“The chinks aren’t very big,” Brennan grunted, dubiously, peering back and forth. “Not much larger than a dime. You don’t think she could have seen some other door across the room, do you? Like the door of that wardrobe?”

“It’s absolutely impossible,” said Mark. “Try it for yourself. The only thing you can see is just what she did see across the room: The Greuze head, the top of the chair, the outlines of the doorposts making a bulge in the walls. There’s no other angle for the eye however you twist your neck. Even if it weren’t for the picture, the chair, and the doorposts, nobody could ever mistake that whacking big wardrobe door, which sticks way out into the room and has a brass handle, for a secret entrance of any kind. … What’s the matter, Captain? You’re not afraid to get down to it, are you?”

With an air of ferocious pleasantry Mark squared off and cradled the axe across his arm. It was almost as though the wall had done him an injury, and he looked on it as a living thing. You might even have fancied a cry, as though from the house, when he swung up the axe and crashed it into the panelling. From a long way off a voice said:

“Satisfied, Captain?”

In the room was a faint gritty haze, and the acrid smell of chipped mortar. That haze showed like the thinning mist outside the windows, from which you could see down across the sunken gardens, the crazy paving of the path, and the rich-blossoming trees of the park. Panelling and wall were gutted to ruin. After the woodwork was gone, mallet and chisel had pried into the bricks and pulled them out as the searchers burrowed through. In several places, nakedly, you could see daylight through the wall.

There was no secret door.

For a time Brennan did not speak. His exertions had made him red in the face, and even his jowls looked wilted. After staring at the wall, he took out a handkerchief with an air of grave deliberation, and mopped his forehead and neck like one performing a ceremony.

“I wouldn’t ‘a’ believed it,” he said. “I wouldn’t ‘a’ believed it. Do you think there might be a door or a trap-door somewhere else along that wall, and the witness was just looking at the wrong place?”

“Oh, we’ll have the panelling down all around the place, just to make sure,” Mark told him. Mark’s grin was so sardonic that he seemed to be showing his teeth. He lounged against the grey light of the window, and spun a chisel round in his hand. “But I rather think, Captain, that you’ve been taken by the slack of the trousers and pitched into belief. What price are you offering for a material universe now?”

Brennan went over and looked unhappily at the door of the cupboard.

“No,” he muttered to himself. Then he craned his neck round again. “By the way, I see there’s a light hanging over that panelling we’ve just torn out. Was that light on when our visitor sneaked out through the door that’s not there? No, wait! The old lady said——”

“That’s right,” agreed Mark, “It wasn’t on. There wasn’t any light except that little reading one at the head of the bed, which is poor at the best; that’s why we have no more information about the visitor, including the color of her hair. Those, you can see, are the only lights in the room. Mrs. Henderson says——”

Stevens found rising in himself a feeling of blind exasperation. Whether the absence of a secret passage was a complete relief he could not be sure; very probably it was. But he was certain of the exasperation.

“May I point out,” he said, “that there is not one single blasted point in this case which does not depend on ‘Mrs. Henderson says.’ To be frank, the repetition of ‘Mrs. Henderson says’ is giving me a pain in the neck. Who is Mrs. Henderson? What is she? Is she an oracle or an augur or a mouthpiece of Holy Writ? Where is Mrs. Henderson? She seems to be about as elusive as Mrs. Harris; for we certainly haven’t seen her here at the house, despite the fact that she knows she’s put the police on the track and almost literally tried to raise the devil. You’ve accused Mark’s wife of murder. You’ve accused my wife of murder. You’ve checked up on the smallest circumstance in connection with them, despite the fact that Lucy has a cast-iron alibi and it’s been proved by independent witnesses that Marie could not possibly have procured or made a dress like the Brinvilliers one. Very well. But when Mrs. Henderson says that blood flows uphill, or that there is a door where we can see for ourselves there isn’t a door, you believe her solely on the grounds that her story is so wildly incredible.”

Mark shook his head. “That’s not as paradoxical as it sounds,” he said. “If she had been lying, why all the fancy trimmings? Why didn’t she simply say she saw the woman in the room giving Miles a drink, and let it go at that? Why add a statement that we could prove was untrue, and therefore wouldn’t believe?”

“You’ve answered your own question. Because you still do believe it, don’t you, or you wouldn’t be arguing with me?”

There was a silence.

“But that,” Stevens went on, “is aside from the immediate point. You ask me why Mrs. Henderson should swear so positively that a dead woman walked through a brick wall. Let me ask you, why should
Mr.
Henderson swear so positively that a dead man walked through a granite wall? Why should he be so insistent that not one stone was disturbed in a sealed crypt? We’ve got two flat impossibilities in this case, and only two: first, the disappearance of the woman from this room; second, the disappearance of the body from the coffin. And it’s a curious thing that the only two witnesses to both those happenings are the Hendersons.”

Brennan was whistling softly through his teeth. He reached into his pocket, produced a package of cigarettes, and passed it round; and each accepted a cigarette, like duelists accepting swords.

Brennan said, “Go on.”

“Let’s take the physical circumstances of this murder, if it was a murder. You, Captain,” Stevens went on, “maintain that the murderer must have been an outsider. I deny that. It seems to me almost certain, that the murderer must have been a member of this household. For there’s just one thing which seems to have been generally overlooked: the
way
in which the poison was administered. It was administered in an egg, milk, and port-wine mixture.”

“I begin to see—” said Brennan.

“Yes. To begin with, is it likely that an outsider would come sneaking in here, get the eggs out of your ice-box, beat them up, add milk from the ice-box and port from your cellar, to make up the mixture? Or, conversely, that an outsider would walk across the fields carrying a bowl of the stuff in order to fill a silver cup on your sideboard? But it leads up to the biggest difficulty: how could any outsider expect to make Miles drink the stuff? You know what trouble you had with him about things that were good for him, particularly on that night. If an outsider had wanted to poison him, an outsider would have chosen something he would certainly drink—like champagne or brandy. No; that homely egg-and-port combination is something that would have occurred to a member of the household, who would (1) think of making it, (2) be able to make Miles drink it. Lucy might have done it, Edith might have done it, the nurse might have done it, even the maid might have done it. But Lucy was dancing at St. Davids, Edith was playing bridge, Miss Corbett was rioting at the Y.W.C.A., and Margaret in Fairmount Park. Which brings us to the question of alibis. There are just two people whose alibis you haven’t checked or even questioned. I don’t need to mention them. But kindly note, with regard to the homely mixture, that one of them is the cook. And both, of them, I think you’ve said, inherit substantially in your uncle’s will.”

Mark shrugged his shoulders.

“I can’t believe it, and that’s flat,” he returned. “In the first place, they’ve been with us too long. In the second place, if they killed Uncle Miles and are cooking up a story to cover it, why should they make the story
supernatural
? What good would that do them? It seems a highly unusual and romantic way to go about it, when ordinary murderers can’t get away with plain lies.”

“Let me ask you something. Last night you told us her story about the mysterious visitor, and about the qualms she had: the ‘funniness’ of the figure, even that pleasant little detail about the possibility that the visitor’s neck might not have been securely fastened on. …”

“WHAT?” said Brennan.

“Now think, Mark. Did you put that idea into her head, as we thought last night—or did she put it into yours?”

“I don’t know,” Mark said, abruptly. “That’s what I’ve been trying to think.”

“But if she hadn’t suggested it to you, would it have occurred to you at all?”

“Maybe not. I don’t know.”

“Here’s something we all know, though. Four of us opened that crypt. Who was the only one of the four who definitely did swear he believed in ghosts? Who tried to throw a supernatural atmosphere over it, even to intimating that there were Powers watching us? Who went to fantastic lengths in swearing that nobody had approached that crypt? Wasn’t it Joe Henderson?”

“Yes, I suppose so. But there’s where it sticks. Do you mean to tell me that a pair of innocent old family retainers would suddenly turn into a couple of demons——”

“Not at all. They’re not demons; you’re the one who’s been importing the demons. I admit that they’re very amiable people. But some very amiable people have been known to commit murder. I admit that they’re faithful to you. But they had no reason to be faithful to
Miles
, who has been so much abroad that (like you) they hardly knew him. And money was to come from Miles to them only on your father’s wish. As for the supernatural story, what was the origin of that?”

“Origin?”

Brennan intervened, pointing a cigarette which had burnt crookedly up one side and seemed to express his state of mind.

“All this,” he said, “is words and words and words. Just the same, I think I see what Mr. Stevens is driving at. Here’s the way I understand it. When the old man died, nobody had any suspicion he’d been poisoned—except you.” He nodded towards Mark. “Because you found the silver cup in that cupboard. And right away Mrs. Henderson comes to you with a story of goblins and women walking out of walls—she didn’t say anything to me about the woman’s head not being fastened on, whatever that is; but all the rest of it’s the same—she comes and tells you that story. Because why? Because you’ll half-believe it. Because it’ll make you
hush the thing up
all the more. The most you’ll do is to open the crypt. And then, when you discover that the goblins have apparently stolen the old man’s body, you’ll hush it up all the more. Doesn’t that square with everything that pair have told us?”

Mark contemplated him with sudden amusement.

“Then,” Mark asked, “the whole parade of lies and body-snatching was got up just to impress me so that I’d keep it all quiet?”

“It might be.”

“But in that case,” said Mark, “will you tell me why yesterday, before the crypt was even opened, Mrs. Henderson blurted out exactly the same story to the Commissioner of Police?”

They looked at each other.

“That’s true,” Stevens admitted.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that, either. Don’t forget your brother Ogden, Mr. Despard,” said Brennan. “He’s a very smart lad, that one is. He suspected, too. And there’s no knowing how far he suspected, or the Hendersons thought he did. They’d know
he
wouldn’t keep it quiet. So maybe Mrs. Henderson got hysterical and did what many another woman has done: she knew she had committed herself, and she wanted to try out her story.”

Again Brennan wandered over to the wardrobe and stared at it, but his air was belligerent now.

“What I’d like to know is how this wardrobe figures in the case. And, friends, I’ve got a hunch it does—somehow. I don’t mean that there’s anything mechanically wrong with it. But it was on the floor inside this thing that you found the poison-cup, wasn’t it? Now, why did the murderer put it in there? Why were
both
the harmless glass of milk and the not-so-harmless cup of arsenic stuck right in here? Why did the cat follow ’em in, and, it’d seem, drink from the cup?” He poked among the suits hanging inside. “Your uncle certainly had a lot of clothes, Mr. Despard.”

“Yes. I was telling the others last night he was supposed to spend a lot of time here changing his clothes for his own edification. But he didn’t like any of us to know he was quite so——”

“That,” said a new voice, “is not all he did in here.”

Edith Despard had come in by the hall door, with such quietness that none of them had heard her. But it was not the quietness of stealth. The underlying expression of her face they did not then understand, and were not to understand until somewhat later. Nevertheless, though her eyes still seemed a trifle sanded from lack of sleep, the thin-boned good looks had a quietness of certainty. To Stevens she appeared for some reason much younger than last night. Under her arm she had two books, on which the fingers of her other hand were tapping gently. In some subtle way she was Fashion; she was handsome and bedecked, though afterwards Stevens realized that he had no notion of what she had been wearing, except that it was black.

Mark was startled. He protested: “Edith, you shouldn’t be here! You promised to stay in bed today. Lucy says you didn’t sleep at all last night: except once, and that was a nightmare.”