The Burning Court (27 page)

“Glad to. I was only wondering how much I’m supposed to tell. Of course, the police are there now, so it will have to come out, anyway. Captain Brennan——”

“Brennan?” demanded Cross, and put his hands on his knees with an air of alertness. “Not Francis Xavier Brennan? Foxy Frank? Fellow who’s always telling anecdotes about his father?”

“That’s the man. Do you know him?”

“I have known Frank Brennan,” said Cross, cocking a meditative eye, “since he was a sergeant. I get a Christmas card from him every year. He plays an admirable hand of poker; but he is limited. In any case, they all listen to me. Now go on with the story.”

As he listened, by some illusion Cross’s face seemed to grow alternately younger and older as some point pleased or displeased him. Occasionally he said, “Beautiful!” or gave a fillip to the brim of his rakish hat; but he only interrupted once, which was to tell the chauffeur to go slower.

“And you believed all this?” he asked.

“I don’t know what I believed or still believe. When they brought in that witchcraft business——”

“Witchcraft be blanked,” observed Cross, using a pungent term. “I trust that you will not insult the nobility of the black arts by comparing them to this piece of charlatanism. It’s murder, man! It’s
murder:
rather well stage-managed, and perhaps with a fine aesthetic conception behind it; but the contriver was of hesitant and bungling mind, and the best part of it was pure accident.”

“Are you going to tell me you have an idea how it was worked and who worked it?”

“Of course I have,” said Cross.

An enormous crash of thunder struck low and rolled in split echoes down the sky; it was followed almost instantly by the lightning, and then the windows grew even darker with driving rain.

“In that case, who is the murderer?”

“A member of that household, obviously.”

“I’ve got to warn you that they all have cast-iron alibis. Except, of course, the Hendersons——”

“I think I may assure you that the Hendersons had nothing to do with this. Besides, this was some one rather more intimately concerned with the death of Miles Despard, and affected by it, than the Hendersons could have been. As for your alibis, do not be impressed. When I murdered Royce (who, I may add, quite deserved death) I had a complete alibi: twenty people, including the waiter, were willing to testify that I was having dinner at Delmonico’s. It was an ingenious and amusing device, which I shall be happy to explain to you when there is more time. The same thing occurred when I committed the robbery by which I obtained my original means of livelihood. In
this
case there is scarcely an original feature. Even the means by which the body was stolen from the crypt, while executed with some degree of finesse, was improved on by my friend Bastion. Bastion finished his sentence in ’06; unfortunately, when he left us and returned to England, they were compelled to hang him; but in the meantime he did certain things which were, from an artistic standpoint, commendable. However, I see that we are slowing down.”

Stevens was out on the sidewalk almost before the car had stopped at the familiar gate. No lights showed in the house. But at the beginning of the walk leading up to the door stood a familiar bulky figure under an umbrella. The figure stared, so that the umbrella wobbled and rain splashed inside upon the neat overcoat of Captain Brennan.

“Frank,” said Cross, “come here. Get into the car.”

“So it’s you—” said Brennan, “Sorry, Mr. Cross, I can’t stop now. I’ve got business here. Afterwards——”

“You foxy-faced bandit,” said Cross, “I have learned more about this case in fifteen minutes than you have learned in a day. I’ll smarten things up.
I’ll
make the fur fly and take the watch-springs out of the miracles! Get into this car. I have somewhat to say unto you.”

Brennan, the umbrella flapping inside out, was in some fashion impelled into the car. Stevens, with the rain beating gratefully on his face, watched them drive away. He could not have spoken. His throat was thick, and relief left him almost physically dizzy. But he turned round and went up the walk to the front door, and Marie was waiting for him there.

They stood presently by a rear window of the living-room, looking out into the garden. He had his arm round her, and upon both of them was peace. It might have been six o’clock. The rain had almost ceased to stir and scamper on the eaves; though it was not yet twilight, there was a white mist in the garden. Dimly through it they could see the sodden grass, the shape of the elm tree, the flower-beds which had lost form and color. Their separate stories had been told.

“I don’t know why I couldn’t tell you,” she said, and her hand tightened round his waist. “Sometimes because it seemed too ridiculous, and sometimes because it seemed too awful. And then you were so—so
easy.
About everything. But people don’t easily get away from things like Aunt Adrienne. I broke away from her, of course, when I came of age.”

“It’s all over, Marie. There’s no reason to talk about it now.”

“But there is!” Marie said, and lifted her head up a little. Yet she did not tremble; the grey eyes were smiling. “That’s what’s caused all the trouble, not talking about it. I’ve always been trying to find out about it. You remember the first day we ever met each other, in Paris?”

“Yes. Number 16, rue Neuve St. Paul.”

“The house of—” She stopped. “I went there, and sat in the courtyard, and wondered whether I should feel anything. It sounds so completely absurd, now I do talk about it, that Aunt Adrienne must have had horrible powers. You never saw my home, Ted. I don’t want you ever to see it. There was a hill behind. …” She put her head back, so that he could see the full line of her throat, and it quivered, but not with fear. She was laughing. “Now, I’ve a sure cure for all this. If I should ever happen to get the blue devils again, or flinch, or have a nightmare sleeping or waking, I want you to do just one thing. You whisper, ‘Maggie MacTavish’ to me and I’ll be all right.”

“Why Maggie MacTavish?”

“That’s my real name, darling. It’s a lovely name. It’s a magic name. You can’t turn it into anything else, no matter how hard you try. But I wish the Despards weren’t so… so… I don’t know what I mean. That house up there is so much like the one I used to live in that it brought the whole thing back to me when I thought you’d chased it out of my system. It’s funny; I couldn’t keep away from that house. It haunted me, or I haunted it. And listen, Ted, I really
did
ask about buying arsenic! That was the horrible part. I don’t know what——”

“Maggie,” he said, “MacTavish.”

“Oh, that’s all right. But I think the climax was that Saturday night when they were telling those ghost stories, and Mark told that foul one about… Any minute I thought I was going to start screaming. I felt I had to forget it for a little while or I would go out of my mind. And I did steal those drug tablets, though I put the bottle back next day. Ted, I don’t wonder at what you were thinking! Now the evidence against me is all piled up, it would have convinced myself if I’d thought of all of it. People have been burned at the stake on less.”

He drew her round to face him, and touched one of her eyelids.

“As a matter of academic interest,” he asked, “you didn’t happen to dose both yourself and me on the following Wednesday night, did you? That was the thing that stuck in my head most. I was dog tired that night, and I went to sleep at ten-thirty.”

“No, I honestly didn’t,” she told him. “That’s true, Ted. And, anyway, I couldn’t have, because I only took one tablet, after all, and I cut that in half when I——”

“One tablet! But there were supposed to be three missing.”

She was puzzled. “Then somebody else must have been at the bottle,” she said, with positiveness and obvious truth. “I was afraid of the things, really; I didn’t know but what I might kill myself, or something. Ted, I wonder what on earth the whole mess is about? Somebody did kill poor Miles. I know
I
didn’t, not even in a dream, because I couldn’t get to sleep until half-past eleven on that night. I wasn’t drugged and I wasn’t drunk, and I was lying right beside you and I remember it. You don’t know how much it’s helped to remember that. But I think that somebody up in the Park guessed what was worrying me. You say Edith…”

She broke off, brushing the subject away.

“But, oh my God! Ted, as much as I talk about being free now, it’s nothing to how I’ll feel if it’s shown there’s a natural explanation for all this! I mean—the murder.
Is
there?
Can
there be? You say Mr. Cross… What do you think of him, by the way?”

Stevens considered. “Well, he’s an old brigand, of course. By his own story he’s a murderer and a thief and I don’t know what else: that is, unless it’s all hot air. If I had something he wanted, I should keep my eye open in case he cut my throat to get it. He
seems completely without moral sense; if there were really any hang-over from the seventeenth century in human form, my guess is that it would take the form of Cross…”

“Don’t say that.”

“One moment, Maggie. I was going to add that, even when you say all this, the man is immensely likable—he seems to have taken a great fancy to you—and he is about as shrewd as they make ’em. Furthermore, if he manages to solve this mystery I’m going to boost his royalty rate up to twenty-five per cent on the first three thousand.”

She shivered. Leaning forward, she started to open the window, and he opened it for her, so that they could both smell the clean air.

“It’s misty, though,” she said. “I thought I smelt smoke. When this is all over, couldn’t you get leave of absence so we could take a trip somewhere? Or maybe I ought to have Aunt Adrienne down here, to see how she looks away from her setting at Guibourg, and prove that she’s only an ugly old woman, after all. Do you know, I really can recite the ritual of the Black Mass? I saw it— It’s a foul thing; I’ll tell you about it sometime. And that reminds me. Just a minute.”

She broke away from him and ran out into the hall; he heard her going upstairs. When she returned she was holding out, as though it might burn her, the gold bracelet with the cat’s head. Even in the gloom by the window he could see that her face was flushed and her breast was heaving.

“There it is. That’s the only thing of
hers
I have now,” she said. She lifted her eyes, and he could see the pin-point black pupil in the grey iris. “I kept it because it was rather pretty and because it was supposed to bring good luck. But now I’ve seen it in the photograph of your eighteen-sixties lady, I want to have it melted down or—” She looked out of the window.

“That’s right. Fire it out the window.”

“It—it cost a lot of money, though,” Marie said, doubtfully.

“Be damned to that. I’ll buy you a better one. Here, give it to me.”

All his own rage at himself seemed to have become centred in that bracelet as a symbol. With a long, low whip, like a catcher to second base, he sent it flying out of the window; and relief welled up in him with the very swing of his arm. It curved past the elm tree, flicking a branch, and was lost in the mist; and at the same time there rose out of the mist the sudden squall and snarl of a cat.

“Ted, don’t—” cried Marie. Then she said, “You heard that.”

“I heard it,” he said, grimly. “That’s a good heavy bracelet, and there was steam behind it. If it caught that cat in the ribs, there was good reason for the cat to yowl.”

“But there’s somebody coming,” she told him, after a pause.

First they heard footsteps in wet grass, then on the gravel path. A figure began to loom up out of the mist, hurrying and taking stumping steps.

“Agreed,” he replied. “But did you think you were calling spirits out of the vasty deep? That’s only Lucy Despard.”

“Lucy?” said Marie, in a queer tone. “Lucy? But why is she coming the back way?”

They both went out to the back door before Lucy had knocked. Lucy came into the kitchen, pulling off a sodden hat, and rather fiercely smoothing down her dark hair. Her coat had been put on in such a hurry that her dress was disarranged, and the lids of her eyes were red, though she was not crying now. She sat down in a white chair.

“I’m sorry, but I’ve really got to inflict myself on you for a while,” she said. She looked at Marie as though in appraisal and wonder, but new worries seemed to come into her head and she dismissed the first thought. Her voice was husky. “I couldn’t stand it up there any longer. Yes—I will have a drink, if you’ve got one. There have been awful things happening up there. Ted… Marie… Mark’s run away.”

“Run away? Why?”

She remained silent for a moment, looking at the floor. Marie put a hand on her shoulder.

“Because I sent him, in a way; and other things,” answered Lucy. “It—it was all right until lunch. We wanted that rather nice police officer—Foxy Frank, you know—to have lunch with us. But he wouldn’t; he insisted on going out to a lunch-wagon. Up to then Mark had been very quiet. He still was quiet. He didn’t say anything or even show any temper, but that’s why I knew something was up. We all went into the dining-room, and just as we were going to sit down at the table, Mark walked up to Ogden and hit him in the face. Then he beat him. How he beat him! I couldn’t stand watching it, and nobody could pull him off. You know what Mark is. He beat him until… well, afterwards Mark just walked out of the room without saying anything, and went to the library and smoked a cigarette.”

She drew a shuddering breath and looked up. Marie, puzzled and uneasy, glanced from Stevens back to Lucy.

“I wouldn’t have wanted to see it,” Marie said, with a higher color; “but, honestly, Lucy, I can’t see anything to make much fuss about. There, if you want the truth! Why somebody hasn’t done that to Ogden before I’ve never been able to understand. He’s been asking for it for a long time.”

“He has,” agreed Stevens. “It was for writing that letter and sending those telegrams, I suppose? Good for Mark.”

“Yes, Ogden admitted he did that. But that wasn’t all. The person who antagonizes Ogden,” said Lucy, in a colorless voice, “is a fool.”