The Burning Court (31 page)

“All these things were only preliminaries. For the stage was now set; he was ready to perform his ‘miracle.’

“This miracle had a double purpose. If—after all the atmosphere of mystery and secrecy he had created—his dupes thought that the theft of the body was supernatural, he had no objection. His purpose was to throw a veil over things, in order that an arsenic-filled body could be removed. But, until the body actually was out of the crypt, until the miracle had been performed, he must not press the supernatural element too far, or his dupes might think he had gone mad and merely refuse to help him. And they had to help him. It was essential that the crypt should be opened in complete secrecy. No light of day, no interfering policemen, nothing that would mitigate against the cloud of suggestion with which he had surrounded it. …

“I will first deal briefly with the mechanics of how he fooled you. It is the one part of the business on which I am disposed to praise him, for it was undeniably excellent acting. He was bargaining on the psychological effect of your finding no body in the coffin, and he had calculated to a nicety how it would make you feel.

“You descended into the crypt. Mark was the only one who had a light—a flashlight. He refused to let
you
take lanterns down there, saying that it would use up too much air. You opened the coffin… and found nothing. You were, I dare say naturally, stunned. After a first impulse not to believe your eyes, what suggestion was immediately put into your head as Mark had anticipated, and, if I am correct, is a suggestion he actually made himself? What were the first words spoken after you discovered the body was missing? Does anyone remember?”

“Yes,” replied Stevens, blankly, “I remember. Mark looked up at the tiers, and flashed his light on them, and said, ‘You don’t suppose we’ve got the wrong coffin, do you?”

Cross bowed gravely.

“It served,” he said, “to fix your attention firmly on the idea that, since the crypt was bare, the body
must
be somewhere there. All this time, of course, the body was actually in the urn covered by flowers. But Mark had one enormous advantage: he had the light. He could direct it just as he could direct proceedings, and all of you believed the body must be in one of the other coffins. Well, what happened? First, you searched the lower tier: with no result. Then it was suggested that the body might have been put higher up; and so we come to the simplest part of the whole affair.
Mark Despard’s entire purpose was to create some excuse whereby all those present except himself would leave the crypt for just a few minutes, and would return to the house; while he was left alone there.
He got his excuse, as you know. Henderson and Stevens were dispatched back to the house to procure step-ladders. Partington was dispatched back to the house (not a difficult matter) to get a drink. We have the word of a police officer who was watching you that, at 12:28, Stevens, Partington, and Henderson left the crypt and came up to the house. Stevens and Henderson did not return until 12:32, the doctor not until 12:35. If that police officer had only remained watching at the crypt during those crucial times, the whole plan would have crashed. But he did not remain; he followed the three to the house. Hence from 12:28 to 12:32 Mark Despard had four minutes entirely alone and unobserved.

“Do I need to tell you what he did? He simply picked the body up out of the urn, went upstairs with it, crossed over to Henderson’s house, and hid the body there—probably in the bedroom.
Then,
when the others came back to the crypt, he was ready to suggest: ‘As a last resort, let’s turn out the urns.’ Which you did: with, of course, no result.”

At this point Joe Henderson came forward shakily. He had not spoken heretofore. The bruise on his temple was an ugly blue.

“Are you telling me, sir,” he said, “that when I saw old Mr. Miles sitting in my bedroom that night—by the winder, in the rocking-chair——”

Cross lifted his glass of sherry from the radio, but he set it down again.

“Ah yes. The entrance of the supernatural folly, the first appearance of a manipulated ghost, had better be dealt with here. That was another completely unintentional business, which Mark Despard had forced on him. You did not see Miles’s ghost, my friend. But you really did see Miles.

“As is evident from even a short consideration of the course of events, once Mark had removed the body from the crypt, his plan was now on its way to a conclusion. Now he could tell his story of the phantom woman walking through the wall. Now he could plant his book on witchcraft in Miles’s room—where Miss Despard later found it. I shall also always wonder whether the piece of string found in the coffin was not, as a matter of fact, left there by that Old Man in the Corner, Mr. Jonah Atkinson, senior. If so, it must have given Mark a turn. I also think that, when he suddenly discovered yesterday what a case could apparently be made out against Mrs. Stevens, he must have wondered whether his brain had not given way and whether the dark world had not pressed through. It appears to me the one thing
which caused him genuine surprise.

“As for disposing of the body, his intentions had been simple. Once the body was out of the crypt, he intended—as soon as he could—to get rid of Stevens and Partington. The first he would send home, the second he would send to the house, drunk. Henderson alone remained, and the body was at the time concealed in Henderson’s bedroom. But that was not difficult. We have heard at great length about the theft of some morphia tablets. Mrs. Stevens took them—but, as a matter of fact, she took only one tablet. Two more had been abstracted by Mark himself, with or without his accomplice’s knowledge.

“As soon as he had got rid of Messrs. Stevens and Partington, Mark intended to give Henderson a strong drug in a drink of liquor. When the old man slid out of sight and tension, Mark could then take the body up out of the bedroom and destroy it——”

“Destroy it?” Edith spoke out suddenly.

“By fire, appropriately enough,” said Cross. “In the roaring blaze which has been going so hard for the last two days in that furnace downstairs; you have all, I think, noticed the pall of smoke over this house outside, and the extreme heat inside. … But there was a hitch in the plan. For Mrs. Despard and Miss Despard, summoned by telegrams, unexpectedly appeared on the scene. That threw the scheme out of gear; the body was still hidden in that bedroom; but the scheme, after all, was only deferred. When everyone had retired for the night, and the visitors were gone, Mark prevailed on Henderson to go down
alone
and cover the crypt with a tarpaulin. … But, in order to get that tarpaulin (as both of them thought) Henderson would have to walk several hundred yards through a wood to a field on the other side of the estate. This would be time enough for Mark to get the body out of Henderson’s house and ready for the furnace.

“Unfortunately, Henderson remembered that the tarpaulin was not near the tennis court, but in his house. When Henderson returned, Mark was actually in that little stone house. Fortunately, however, he had taken one precaution—he had given Henderson a drink drugged with morphine, and its effects were already being felt. A light unscrewed in its socket… a corpse propped up in a chair, used as a doll or dummy for a ghost scare… a man behind, rocking that chair and even lifting the hand of the corpse… it all had its effect on a man already frightened half out of his wits; and the morphia took care of the rest. Mark was then free to carry the body to the fire”

Cross paused, and turned on them a broad smile of urbanity and charm.

“I may add something which you have doubtless already noticed: the house is unusually cold this afternoon. That is why I thought we should remain upstairs. Captain Brennan’s men are now engaged in dragging out that furnace. They may not find anything, but——”

Myra Corbett took two steps forward, and it was apparent that her knees were shaking. She was clearly so horrified that it produced in her a drawn ugliness.

“I don’t believe that! I don’t believe it,” she said. “Mark never did that. If he did, he’d have told me. …”

“Ah,” said Cross. “Then you do admit that you poisoned Miles Despard. By the way, my good friends, there is just one point remaining in connection with our friend Jeannette. It is true that she told a story yesterday which appeared to incriminate Mrs. Stevens. To the surprise of everyone (including herself), Mrs. Stevens really did ask where arsenic could be bought; just as Miss Edith Despard actually bought some. But don’t you see the significance of the story, the part our nurse was trying to stress? Who actually began that conversation, who asked ten thousand questions about poisons and their effects?
She
said it was Lucy Despard; she corrected you sharply and insisted on that. She was still being consistent. And her accusations were only shifted when it became apparent that Mrs. Despard had an unmistakable alibi. So, if she admits that she poisoned…”

Though she marred the gesture with something very like a snarl, Myra Corbett put out her hands as though she were praying.

“I didn’t kill him. I did not. I never thought of it. I didn’t want any money. All I wanted was Mark. He didn’t run away because he did anything like that. He ran away because of that——that’s his wife. You can’t prove I killed the old man. You can’t find the body, and you can’t prove it. I don’t care what you do to me. You can beat me till I die, but you won’t get anything out of me. You know that. I can stand pain like an Indian. You’ll never——”

She broke off, choking. She added, with sudden rather terrifying misery: “Doesn’t anybody believe me?”

Ogden Despard, smashed and ugly, put out his hand. “I’m beginning to think
I
do,” he said. He looked at them. “Whatever I’ve done in the past,” he added, coolly, “I’ve had a perfect right to do, and I advise none of you to question it. But there’s one thing I must correct you on. This woman at least never made any telephone call to St. Davids, on the night of the masquerade party.
I
did that. It struck me that it would be amusing to see Lucy’s reactions when she heard Mark had picked up his old affair again. You can’t do anything to me, you know, so you might as well take it calmly.”

Brennan stirred and stared. Cross, with an air of simian courtesy, lifted his glass of sherry, saluted Ogden, and drank.

“I drink your health,” he said, “on the pretext of what I am compelled to recognize as the one time in your doubtless useless life when you have attempted to do anyone a service. Though I am never wrong in my diagnoses, I can assure you that I preserve a mind sufficiently open to acknowledge an error. If it were the last word I ever——”

He stopped, making a slight gesture with his glass. They had looked at the nurse, who was coming forward, when they heard a small bumping sound. Cross had gone forward across the radio, and seemed to be trying to writhe over on his back. They saw his eyeballs; he seemed to be trying to draw air through lips too thick for him. He succeeded at last in writhing over, but resistance was gone, for he fell on his back. It seemed to Stevens’s stupefied wits a long time before anyone moved. Cross lay convulsed in a fawn-colored suit, spilled beside the radio, with the glass in his hand; but he had stopped moving by the time Partington reached him.

“This man is dead,” Partington said.

Stevens thought afterwards that if the doctor had made any other statement in the world, however incredible, any horror of fantasy or reality, then he might have believed it. But he could not believe this.

“You’re crazy!” shouted Brennan in the midst of a pause. “He slipped. He fainted, or something. He couldn’t just—like that——”

“He’s dead,” said Partington. “Come and see for yourself. By the smell of him I’d say it was cyanide. It’s as nearly instantaneous as anything in the codex. You had better preserve that glass.”

Brennan put down his briefcase very carefully, and came over. “Yes,” Brennan said—“yes, he’s dead.” Then he looked at Myra Corbett. “He took that glass from you. You were the only one who touched either the decanter or the glasses. He took that glass from you, and walked over there to the radio by himself. Nobody was near him, nobody could have put cyanide there except you. But he didn’t drink immediately, as you hoped. He was too much of an actor. He waited until he could get a good excuse for a toast.—You devil, there wasn’t enough jury-evidence against you before. But there is now. You know what’ll happen to you? You’ll fry in the electric chair.”

The woman was smiling, weakly and foolishly and almost incredulously. But her former self-control had almost gone, and when Brennan’s men came upstairs they had to give her a supporting hand while she walked down.

“The tendency has gone so far that one is led to ask oneself, not without the gravest apprehension, ‘Is there, then, no evidence of extreme depravity?’ For the wholesale elimination of the utter villain from history could hardly be regarded save in the light of an aesthetic calamity.”

—T
HOMAS
S
ECCOMBE
,
Twelve Bad Men

The brittle, bright autumn weather had faded from dusk into night. A few leaves, shaded like the colors of a vase, still clung to the trees when the wind rose; the bowl of the valley was brown. A desk calendar in the nest, snug room showed in red figures that it was the 30th of October, which is the night before All-Hallow’s Eve.

It was a room with fat-bowled lamps on the tables, and chairs covered with bright reddish-orange material, and a good copy of a Rembrandt—
The Lovers
—above the fireplace. On the divan lay an open newspaper, whose headlines showed along with a part of the story:

DEMON NURSE ESCAPES CHAIR

Innocent, Says Myra, as Life Term Begins

Still declaring her innocence, Myra Corbett, the “demon nurse,” who was sentenced to death on October 9th for the murder of Gaudan Cross, author, heard today that the pardon board had commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. G. L. Shapiro, her attorney, admitted that no trace had yet been found of the “phantom accomplice,” Mark Despard; but said that——