The Burning Court Read online

  At the other end of the crypt, towards their left, the light picked out a tall marble plaque on the wall, inscribed with the names of those who had been buried here. Over it drooped a marble angel, with head hidden. On either side of the plaque stood a great marble urn, out of which a mass of dead flowers still drooped; and there were the remains of more flowers on the floor.1 Stevens observed that on the plaque the first name was Paul Desprez, 1650-1706. The name turned into ‘Despard’ just past the middle of the eighteenth century; and it might be guessed that the family, having sided with the British during the French and Indian War, found it convenient to Anglicize their name. The last on the roll, boldly cut with a shock of obtruding the present, was Miles Bannister Despard, 1873-1929.

  Mark’s light moved away, and over to find Miles’s coffin. It was in the wall directly opposite them, and in the lowest tier, which was only a few feet from the floor. It was the last in its tier. All the niches to the left were occupied, and there were several vacant places to the right. It stood out not only because it was new and gleaming, where all the others were crusted with dust or rust or corruption, but because it was the only coffin in its tier made of wood.

  They stood for a moment in silence, and Stevens heard Henderson breathing behind his shoulder. Mark turned and handed Henderson the light.

  “Keep this on it,” he said. His voice came back in such echoes that he jumped; it was as though the voice itself raised dust. “Come on, Ted; take one side and I’ll take the other. I could lift it down by myself, but we have to go easy.”

  As they moved forward, they all started again to hear footsteps coming down the stairs behind, and they whirled round. The lantern was burning on the path up at the top of the crypt; Partington, with his bag and box and two ordinary Mason jars perched on top. On either side of the coffin, Stevens and Mark Despard slid their hands into the niche and pulled. …

  “It’s damned light,” Stevens found himself saying.

  Mark said nothing, but he looked more startled than he had been that night. The coffin was made of polished oak scrolled at the edges, and of no great size; Miles had been five feet six. On the top was a silver name-plate, with Miles’s name and the dates. With a very small heave they hoisted it out and put it on the floor.

  “It’s too damned light, I tell you,” Stevens found himself saying. “Here, you won’t need that screwdriver; this thing opens with two long bolts and clasps down through the centre of the edges. Catch hold.”

  They heard the clink as Partington put down his Mason jars, together with a sheet in which he was apparently going to do some wrapping-up. Mark and Stevens tugged at the bolts until the coffin-lid began to lift. …

  The coffin was empty.

  The coffin, bedded with white satin, gleamed under the shaking light in Henderson’s hand; but it was empty. There was not even a pinch of dust.

  Nobody said anything, though each could hear the others breathe. Mark sat back on his haunches so abruptly that he nearly fell over backwards. Then, with a common impulse, both he and Stevens turned down the lid of the coffin to look at the silver name-plate again.

  “Mother of Go—” said Henderson, and stopped.

  “You—you don’t suppose we’ve got the wrong coffin, do you?” asked Mark, rather wildly.

  “I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles we haven’t.” Henderson declared. His hand was trembling so much that Mark took the light from him. “I saw him put into that. Look, there’s the nick in it they made when they bumped it coming downstairs. Besides, what other coffin? All the others—” He pointed to the tiers of steel ones.

  “Yes,” said Mark, “that’s his coffin all right. But where is he? Where’s he got to?”

  They looked at one another in the gloom, and into Stevens’s mind had come unnatural notions which were as stifling as the air of the crypt. Partington alone seemed to remain quiet, steady with either common sense or whisky; even a trifle impatient. “Buck up,” he said to Mark, sharply, and put his hand on the other’s shoulder. “Here! all of you! Don’t get any fool ideas about this. The body’s gone; well, what of it? You see what it means, don’t you? It only means that somebody’s got here ahead of us and stolen the body out of there—for whatever reason.”

  “How?” asked Henderson, in a blank, querulous tone.

  Partington looked at him.

  “I said, How?” repeated Henderson, his voice rising doggedly. He backed away, his hands feeling behind him, as the full presentiment of what had happened soaked like water into every corner of his heavy mind. Mark put the light in his face, and the old man cursed and brushed the face with a corduroy sleeve as though to wipe something off. “How did somebody get in and out? That’s what I want to know, Doctor Partington. I said a minute ago I’d swear on a stack of Bibles that was Mr. Miles’s coffin, and I saw him put into it and carried down here. And I’ll tell you something else, Doctor Partington: nobody could’ve got in and out of this place! Look at it. It took four of us, working two hours and making a racket fit to wake the dead, just to open the entrance. Do you think somebody could get in here—opening it up with me and Mrs. Henderson sleeping twenty feet away from it, with the windows up, and not hearing one single sound; and me a light sleeper, too?—and not only that, but of them putting all the things right back again, mixin’ their own concrete right there and setting the pavement down again? Do you think that? Yes, sir, and I’ll tell you something more. I laid that pavement myself, a week ago; I know how I laid it; and it’s exactly as I put it down myself. I’ll take my oath before God that nobody has touched that pavement, or monkeyed with it in any way, since then!”

  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 ther
e’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.

  VII

  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; an
d 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?”