“Fly open, lock, to the dead man’s knock,
Fly bolt, and bar, and band!——”
—R. H. BARHAM, Ingoldsby Legends
Stevens walked up King’s Avenue the short distance to the gates of the Park. There was no moon, but a crowding of stars. As usual, the iron-grilled gates—with each entrance pillar topped by an unimpressive stone cannon-ball—stood wide open. He shut them, and dropped the bar. The gravel drive went slightly uphill; it was a long distance to the house, and seemed longer by reason of the drive’s windings among shrewd landscaping. Henderson required two assistants to keep these grounds in order. With all their riding round on motor mowing-machines, somebody’s head was always to be seen up over the top of an ornamental hedge, or seeming, in ghostly fashion to stick out of a tree: to the accompaniment of a snip-snip-pause-snip-snip of shears. It made a drowsy sound in summer, when you might lounge in a deck-chair at the crest of the lawns, and look down over a blaze of flower-beds under the sun.
As he went up the drive, Stevens kept himself thinking of this. He refused to think of anything else. Non cognito, ergo sum.
The house was long and low, built of stone in the form of the head of a letter T with its short wings towards the road. There was nothing at all distinguished about the house, except that it had grown old well. It did not butt against the years, or show its bones and wait for death; but it had become a part of the soil. Its curved roof-tiles had become an unobtrusive reddish brown; its thin chimneys seemed proper, though no smoke went up from them. The windows were small, in casement fashion after the French style of the late seventeenth century. Some one in the nineteenth century had added a low front porch, but even this had ceased to obtrude itself; and had almost taken root. The porch light was burning. Stevens went up and hammered the knocker.
Otherwise the house seemed to be dark. After a few minutes Mark opened the door. He led the way through the familiar hall, which smelt of age and Bibles and furniture-polish, out through the house into the kitchen. Modern implements looked small in that kitchen, and it had the appearance of a workroom as well. Partington, more bulky than ever in ancient sheathing of Harris tweeds, remained stolidly by the gas-range and smoked a cigarette. At his feet lay a black bag and a large leather-covered box. Ranged against the table were the hammers, the shovels, the picks, the steel wedges, and two flat steel bars about eight feet long, of which Henderson was taking stock now. Henderson was a smallish but very wiry old man in corduroys, with a long nose, blue eyes encircled in wrinkles like walnuts, and a bald head brushed over with such indeterminate wisps of grey hair that they seemed like an illusion of hair. There was an air of uneasiness in the kitchen, a conspiratorial air which drew everyone together, and Henderson was the most uneasy. When Mark and Stevens came in, he jumped up, scratching the back of his neck.
“It’s all right,” Mark said, testily. “We’re not going to commit any crime. Got all your doings, Part? You, Ted, you can make yourself useful. Fill these up.” From under the sink he brought out two lanterns and a big tin of kerosene. “I’ve got a flashlight for the crypt, but these will be the only things to use while we dig. Yes, I hope it’s all right. You know, we’re going to make a hell of a lot of racket with those hammers. …” He hesitated. “You don’t suppose——?”
Henderson spoke aggrievedly, in a heavy bass voice. He still scratched the back of his neck, and squared round. “Well, Mr. Mark, don’t you get to being nervous now. I don’t like this thing, and your pap wouldn’t ’a’ liked it; but if you say it’s all right, I’ll do it. If you want me to, I can muffle up them hammers a little, so they’ll make less noise. Do you remember, I did it once when Miss Edith was sick and we were changing the wall in the garden? But I don’t think anybody’ll hear, down as far as the road; no, it’s not likely anybody’ll hear, down as far as the road; and all I’m afraid of is that maybe your wife or your sister or my wife will come back here, or Mr. Ogden. I can tell you, and you know yourself, Mr. Ogden he’s a pretty curious young fellow, and if he takes it into his head…”
“Ogden’s in New York,” Mark said, shortly. “The rest of them are in good hands, and they won’t be back until next week. Ready?”
Stevens had found a tin funnel in the kitchen cupboard, and had filled both lanterns. Laden with their gear, they went out the back door. Mark and Henderson walked ahead with the lanterns swinging. That homely, honest, look-out-for-the-railway-crossing light gave a better look to their body-snatchers’ implements. All the same, the Park did not like it. Ahead the broad path stretched in patchwork paving, first with the sunken gardens on either side, then the tall lines of elms, and, far at the end, the chapel dark under starlight. Presently they passed the small house occupied by the Hendersons, and some twenty feet farther on—no great distance in front of the chapel door—Mark and Henderson set down the lanterns. The latter dug the heel of his boot into mud and drew out on the stones the area they were to attack, before he put each into position.
“Now just you be careful you don’t kill each other with them picks,” he said, rather malevolently. “That’s all I ask of you, just you be careful. Make a hole with the pick for the wedge to go in, and then use your hammers. All I have to say is——”
“Right,” said Partington cheerfully. “Let’s go.”
The picks came down with a crash, and Henderson wailed.
It took two hours. At a quarter to twelve by his wrist watch, Stevens found himself sitting back flat in the wet grass beside the path, taking big breaths. His whole body was clammy with sweat in the cool wind, his heart was bumping, and he felt as though he had been through the wringer. Sedentary life, eh? That was it. But, with the possible exception of Mark, he was the strongest of the three, and he felt that the whole weight of that stone had been on him.
Taking up the paving had not been over-difficult, though it seemed to rouse such a hellish din that he felt it must be audible for half a mile, and once Mark had made a trip to the front of the house to find out whether it was as bad as it sounded. Nor was the removing of the gravel and soil too difficult; but Henderson, a martinet, insisted on having it in neat piles afterwards, and it had taken some time. Afterwards the levering up of a stone slab weighing nearly half a ton was the hardest; once Partington had slipped, the stone had wavered, and for a second Stevens thought the whole thing was coming over on them. Now the stone stood upright on its side, like the lifted lid of a chest, held there by its own weight. The entrance to the crypt had the appearance of the inside of a chest, being a stone-wailed oblong with a flight of stone steps going down ten feet.
“Done it,” said Partington, still cheerfully, although he was panting and coughing. “Any more impediments? If not, I’ll go back to the house and wash my hands for what’s got to be done.”
“And to get yourself a drink,” breathed Mark, looking after him. “Well, I don’t blame you.” He turned back again, holding up the lantern, and grinning at Henderson like a wolf.
“Do you want to go down first, H., my lad?”
“No, I don’t,” snapped the other, “and you know I don’t. I’ve never been down in that place, not when your father nor your mother nor your uncle was buried, and I wouldn’t go down now if it wasn’t for helping you lift the coffin—”
“You needn’t worry about that,” Mark told him, holding the lantern higher, “if you don’t want to go down. It’s a wooden coffin, not very heavy, and two men could handle it easily.”
“Oh, I’m going down, all right; you can bet your last dollar on that; I’m going down,” declared Henderson, with belligerent emphasis which was a trifle scared just the same. “You talking about poisons, like books! Poisons! Your pap’ud poison you if he was here! I never heard such foolishness in my life. I know, I know, I oughtn’t to sass you back. I’m only old Joe Henderson, that whacked you good and hard many’s the time when you was a kid. …” He stopped and spat. Now appeared the real reason behind this querulousness, for he said, quietly: “Honest to God, now, are you sure you haven’t heard anybody around here watching us? I been feeling like that ever since we came out here.”
His eyes flashed over his shoulder. Stevens got up, opening and shutting stiff hands, and came over to join them by the mouth of the crypt. Mark moved the lantern round; wind stirred in the elms; nothing more.
“Come on,” Mark said, abruptly. “Part’ll catch up with us. Leave the lanterns here. They use up air; and there’s no ventilation down there; and we want all the ventilation we can get. Smell it? I’ve got a flashlight. …”
“Your hand’s shaking, Mr. Mark,” said Henderson.
“And you lie,” said Mark. “Follow on.”
The enclosure of the little staircase, although damp, was completely free from marshiness. Its close air pressed the lungs with almost a feeling of warmth. At the foot of the stairs was a rounded archway, with a rotted wooden door hanging from its frame, opening into the crypt; and a heavier air stirred at their coming. The beam of Mark’s flashlight moved inside. That crypt had been opened only ten days ago: which, Stevens thought, made it easier to go into now. Its damp closeness was still thick with an overpowering odor of flowers.
Mark’s light showed a mausoleum oblong in shape, some twenty-five feet long by fifteen feet wide, and built throughout of massive granite blocks. In the centre an octagonal granite pillar supported the groined roof. On two sides the crypt was a catacomb. In the one long wall facing them as they entered, and in the short wall to the right, niches had been made in regular tiers to contain the dead. The exposed coffins were set into the wall endways, evidently from some one’s business-like wish to save space even in the grave; and the niches were barely larger than the coffins. Near the top, where the old Despards lay, most of the niches were ornamented with marble facings, scrollwork, a contorted angel or two, even a Latin eulogy; but lower down they became more severe. Some tiers were filled, some almost empty; and eight coffins could be laid along one tier.
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 there’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.
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; and 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?”
The creak slowed away to silence. “So help me Harry,” declared Henderson, slowly, “I believe I do.”
“Nonsense!”
Henderson frowned at the table, still hugging his arms. “Now, mind you,” he said, “I don’t care much whether there’s ghosts or not. I’m not afraid of ’em, if that’s what you mean, not if one was to walk in the room this minute. I’m not superstitious; and being superstitious is being afraid of ghosts.” He considered. “You know, I always remember what old Mr. Ballinger says to me, forty years ago, out in the part of Pennsylvania where I come from. Mr. Ballinger, he was ninety years old if he was a day; and he always wore an elegant plug hat; but there he was every day, out weeding his garden or working round the house like anybody else; and once it gave everybody a fit when we saw him right out on the roof of his house, sixty feet and more up on a sloped roof, fixing the tiles, in his shirt-sleeves and his plug hat—at ninety. Well, sir, there was an old graveyard next to his place, that wasn’t used any longer and that nobody paid any attention to. And when Mr. Ballinger wanted new paving for a part of his cellar, he just hops through the fence and takes some old gravestones. Yes, sir, that’s what he did.
“Well, I remember I was coming past his back yard, where he was digging, and I said: ‘Mr. Ballinger, ain’t you afraid something might happen to you, for taking them gravestones?’ So Mr. Ballinger he leans on his spade, and he spits about a pint of tobacco juice over one shoulder, and he says: ‘Joe,’ he says, ‘Joe, I ain’t a-skeered of any dead people, and don’t you be a-skeered of any dead people, either. It’s these livin’ sons-of-bitches you want to watch out for.’ Yes, sir, that’s just what he said, and I never forgot it. ‘It’s these livin’ sons-of-bitches you want to watch out for,’ he said. Yes, sir. If they’re dead, they can’t hurt you. Leastways, they can’t hurt me; that’s the way I figure it out. And as for whether there is or there isn’t any, I was hearin’ just the other night, on the radio, what Shakespeare said——”
Mark did not shut him off, but was looking at him curiously. Henderson, with a blank and profound expression on his face, was looking steadily at the edge of the table, and rocking in a slow pontifical manner. Whether he believed more in danger from the dead or the living, it was plain that he had got a bad fright just the same.
“I want to ask you something,” said Mark, quickly. “Did Mrs. Henderson tell you the same story she told me?”
“About the woman in Mr. Miles’s room the night he died?” asked the other, not taking his eyes from the edge of the table.
“Yes.”
Henderson seemed to reflect. “Yes, she did,” he admitted.
“I told you a while ago,” Mark went on, turning to the other two, “that I wouldn’t begin with that story, or you might not believe me. But I can tell you now, now that I don’t know what to believe, myself.
“The important thing about the first part of it was (as I think I told you) that Mrs. Henderson had been away for a week, and didn’t get back home that night until we had already left for the masquerade. Consequently, she didn’t know what sort of costume either Lucy or Edith was wearing. … Wait a minute!” He looked at Henderson. “Unless you told her. Did you tell her, when she got back?”
“Me? No,” growled the other. “I didn’t even know what they were wearing, myself. I knew they was working on fancy-dress costumes. But fancy dress is fancy dress, and it all looks alike to me. No, I didn’t say anything.”
Mark nodded.
“So this is the story she told me. That night, the Wednesday night, she got back from the station about twenty-five minutes to ten. First of all she took a trip through the house, just to see that everything was in place. Everything was. She knocked at Miles’s door, and, though he didn’t open it, he answered her through it. Like Edith, she was worried. Clear out there at the back of the house—where we are now—nobody would be able to hear him unless he opened a window and shouted. Like Edith, she wanted to come and sit in the hall, or at least downstairs. Miles wouldn’t hear of it; apparently he was annoyed. He said something like ‘What the devil do you think I am, a helpless invalid? I keep telling everybody I’m quite all right. Go back to your own place.’ Which surprised her, because he was usually punctiliously polite to a point of the comic. She said: ‘Well, anyway, I’ll come back again at eleven o’clock and see how you are.’
“Now, she was coming back at eleven o’clock, in any case, and there hangs the story.
“For a good year, ever since it’s been on the air, there’s a certain radio-program which she’s listened to every Wednesday evening at eleven o’clock precisely. It’s called, I believe,” said Mark, with sardonic and full-blown hatred rather than amusement, “ ‘the Ingelford Soothing Hour of Sweet Music,’ being in fact half an hour, being anything but soothing, and advertising some sort of soothing syrup——”
Henderson blinked, looking genuinely shocked. “It’s nice music,” he said, with warmth. “It’s mighty nice music, and don’t you forget it. Sort of restful.” He appealed to the others. “What he means is, I’ve got a radio down here, and it’s a good one. But it’s been on the blink for a couple of weeks, and the Mrs. asked whether she could listen in to the Ingelford Soothing Hour on the radio up at the house.”
“That’s it,” said Mark. “And I think we’d better emphasize the Ingelford Soothing Hour, just to show there was no idea of—well, of the dark world, of anything wrong. Do you see? Suppose the powers of hell really could lay hold, suppose they could run on our smooth rails and get into our steam-heated lives past such a shower of banalities as Ingelford’s Soothing Hour… then I tell you the powers of hell must be strong and terrible. We huddle together in cities, we make bonfires of a million lights, we can get a voice from across the ocean to sing to us so that we needn’t feel lonely; it’s a sort of charmed circle, with no heaths to walk at night in the wind. But suppose you, Ted, in your apartment in New York; or you, Part, in your flat in London; or John Smith in his house anywhere in the world—suppose you went home at night, and opened the ordinary door, and heard another kind of voice. Suppose you didn’t want to look behind the umbrella-stand, or go down to attend to the furnace at night, because you might see something climbing up?”
“That,” said Partington, very distinctly, “is what I meant by brooding.”
“Ye-es, I imagine it is,” agreed Mark, nodding and grinning. He drew a deep breath. “All right. I’ll go back to the story. Here’s Mrs. H. hurrying up to the house, to be in time for her radio-program at eleven o’clock. I ought to explain that the radio is in a sun porch on the second floor. I won’t go into much detail, because I’m going to take you over the ground. I’ll just say that at one end of the sun porch there’s a French door opening on Miles’s room. We always asked him why he didn’t use it as a private sun porch of his own—we never used it a great deal, ourselves—but he never liked it, for some reason. As a rule he kept a thick curtain across the glass door. It’s an ordinary sort of porch, a whole lot more modern and modern-furnished than the rest of the house—wicker furniture, bright covers, plants, and the rest of it.
“So she went upstairs. She was afraid she was going to be late for the beginning of the program, so she didn’t loiter outside Miles’s door in the outer hall; she just knocked, and said, ‘All right?’ and when he answered, ‘Yes, yes, everything’s fine,’ she went on round the turn of the passage into the sun porch. Miles, I should mention, never objected to the radio being used; very often, again for some reason peculiar to himself, he said he liked it; so she had no scruples about that. She turned on the bridge lamp by the radio—which is at the end farthest away from Miles’s glass door—and sat down. And, in the few seconds’ interval while the set was warming up, she heard a woman’s voice speaking behind Miles’s glass door.
“Now, she was startled a good deal. She knew Miles’s usual dislike of having anybody in his room when he could avoid it; and, furthermore, she knew everybody in the house was out… or was supposed to be out. The first thought that came into her head (she told me next morning) was a strong suspicion of Margaret, the maid. She knew Miles’s reputation as an old rip. Margaret’s a good-looking girl; and Mrs. Joe swears she’s often thought Miles was casting an eye in her direction; and Margaret was sometimes allowed in the room when nobody else was. (That’s excluding the nurse, but then Miss Corbett wasn’t what you’d call a good-looker or inclined towards dalliance.) So there sat Mrs. Joe while the radio began to tinkle, glaring at it and putting together in a rush every suspicious circumstance: Miles’s anxiety to be left alone that night, his bad temper when somebody knocked at the door, and she—didn’t like it.”
Mark hesitated, and glanced shrewdly at Henderson before he spoke the last three words. Henderson was fidgeting.
“So she got up, as quietly as she could, and went over to the glass door. There was a faint sound as though the voice were still speaking, but the radio was on now, and she couldn’t make out anything at all. And then she saw a vantage-point. A heavy brown-velvet curtain was drawn close over the door, but it had been pulled a little crookedly when it was closed. At the extreme left of the door, rather high up, there was a chink where the curtain made a bulge; and another at the right of the door, lower down. By straining, you could see through either of them with one eye. She looked first through the left-hand one, and then moved across and peeped through the other. There was no light in the sun porch except that bridge lamp at the other end, so there wasn’t much chance of her being seen from the other side. … Well, what she saw put her moral scruples at rest and convinced her that nothing of sexual luridness was going on. She had expected to find an appropriate through-the-keyhole drama, on patterned lines of wifely horror; maybe it was a let-down, but somehow the lines had got all crooked. …
“Through the chink to the left, she could see nothing except the wall directly opposite her across the room, rather high up. In that wall (which is the rear wall of the house) there are two windows. Between the windows stands a very high-backed curious Carolean chair; and on the wall, which is panelled in walnut, hangs a small Greuze head of which Uncle Miles was fond. She could see the chair and had a good view of the painting; but no human beings. Then she looked through the chink at the right.
“This time she saw Miles and some one else. There was the bed, its head against the wall on her right-hand, its side facing her. The only light in the room was that same dim shaded light over the head of the bed. Miles was sitting up in bed, in his dressing-gown, with an open book face downwards on his lap; and he was looking straight towards the glass door in the direction of Mrs. Joe—but not at her.
“Facing him, her back to the glass door, stood a small woman. Remember that the light was dim, and she was in silhouette against it. She did not move; she was a kind of cloud; but it seemed a trifle strange that she did not move at all. Still, Mrs. Joe was close enough to make out every detail of her costume. And she describes it simply as ‘just exactly like that one in the gallery… you know.’ She explained which one she meant, that picture supposed to be the Marquise de Brinvilliers, but yet she would not mention it directly by name; just as you”—he looked at Henderson—”will never say, ‘the crypt.’ but only ‘that place.’
“Now, what puzzled me for a second was why she should have thought there was anything queer about it, anything at all. She knew that both Lucy and Edith had gone to a masquerade that night, even though she didn’t know what costumes they wore: the natural thing would be to think immediately it was one of them. And, she admitted to me, she did think it presently, and realized what it must have been. What I want to emphasize is that it didn’t strike her as at all weird, but only with some momentary idea that ‘it looked awful funny, somehow.’ And when I tried to discover what this funniness consisted in, she thought it might partly have been Miles’s expression. And that expression, distinct where he sat back by the dim light, was fear.”
There was a pause, and through the open windows they could hear the vast rustle of the trees.
“But, my God! man,” said Stevens, keeping his voice down as well as he could, “what about the woman? What else about her? Couldn’t Mrs. Henderson see anything else about her? For instance—was she blonde or brunette?”
“That’s it, you see. She couldn’t even tell that,” Mark replied in an even voice. He clasped his hands in front of him. “It appears that she had on her head some kind of thing made of a gauze material… not to cover her face, but to go over her hair and hang down the back a little way… not very big. It went down as far as the back of the square-cut dress, which was medium low. And again (mind you, I’m only quoting Mrs. H’s own hazy ideas) there seemed ‘something awful funny’ about that. It didn’t seem like any right kind of head covering; more like a misplaced scarf. All these, I should judge from the narrative, were quick ideas: for it also struck her that there was something also funny about the woman’s neck. I had to drag it out of the witness, and it wasn’t till several days afterwards that she came round and hinted at it.
“The idea was that the woman’s neck might not have been completely fastened on.”
Stevens was conscious of all things sharply: of the dingy-papered room and the once-fine leather furniture with brown seams, which he supposed had formerly been used at the house; of the many domestic photographs; of their coffee-cups, and the pile of gardening catalogues on the table; above all, of Mark’s clean hook-nosed face and light-blue eyes, with the sandy brows meeting in the middle, at the head of it. The lace curtains blew a little at the windows. It was fine weather.
He was also conscious that Henderson’s face had gone a muddy color, and that Henderson’s rocking-chair was nearly over against the radio.
“Greatgoddalmighty,” said Henderson, not above a whisper. “She didn’t tell me that.”
“No, you can bet she didn’t,” said Partington, viciously. “Mark,” he went on, “for your own good, I ought to hit you in the jaw. For your own good, to stop this poisonous rubbish——”
“Look out for squalls if you do,” Mark said, mildly. He did not now seem under so great a nervous strain; he was calm and puzzled and a little tired. “It may be rubbish, Part. As a matter of fact, I think it is, myself. I’m only telling you what was told and suggested to me, and trying to make it as unemotional as a case-history: if I can. Because, whatever it is, I’ve got to find a way out of it. … Shall I keep on going? Or, if you prefer, shall I get it all out of my system?”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose you’d better,” Partington told him. He sat down again. “And you’re right about one thing. If you had told us this story early in the evening, it’s a question whether you’d have got help.”
“I know that.—Again, to soften this business a little, we must all understand that it didn’t hit Mrs. Henderson, or me, with such a complete shock as my telling it may do. I mean that it wasn’t so bald as that. Things grow. Now you can say, if you want to, that I’m spinning a yarn because Lucy herself wore a dress like that; and if the police ever took this thing up they would have only one idea. Yes, you can say it, but I don’t think you’ll believe it.
“As I say, Mrs. Henderson saw the woman there: an ordinary figure, whom she thought to be Lucy or Edith. She didn’t think much more than that, except about the funniness. So she walked away, and went back to her chair by the radio to listen to the Soothing Hour. After all, she couldn’t admit she’d been peeping through a curtain, by rapping on the glass and singing out, ‘Is that you, Mrs. Despard?’ Still, I gather that she wasn’t altogether soothed. So when the quarter-hour interval came, for the advertising, and somebody began extolling the benefits of Ingelford’s Soothing Syrup, she went back to the glass door again, and looked through the right-hand chink.
“The woman in the Marquise de Brinvilliers dress had moved, yes. But she seemed to have moved only six inches forward, towards the bed, and she was motionless again. It was as though she were making a slow progress; and the watcher had not seen her move. Also, she was turned just a trifle more to the right, so that her right hand could be seen. This hand held a silver cup, presumably the one I later found in the cupboard, and held it still. Mrs. Joe thought that there was no longer an expression of fear on Miles’s face, which reassured her: she says there was no expression at all.
“At this minute, such is nature, Mrs. Joe thought she was going to cough, and couldn’t stop herself. She felt the cough coming up in her throat; and, when she felt she couldn’t keep it down, she ran away from the door, over to the middle of the sun porch, and let it out with as little noise as she could. But, when she got back to her vantage-point again, the woman had gone.
“Miles was still sitting up in bed, his head back against the headboard. In his left hand he held the silver cup, but his right arm was shading his face with the elbow across his eyes. And the woman had gone.
“The watcher began to get panicky. She tried to see more of the room, but the chink was too small; so on a chance she flew over to the chink on the left-hand side of the door. …
“Now, in the opposite wall containing the two windows, the one I’ve described to you, there was (once upon a time) a door. This door was bricked-up and panelled-over more than two hundred years ago; but you can still see the outline of the door-posts in the wall. The door was just between the two windows, and used to lead to a part of the house which was—destroyed”—Mark hesitated again—“at the same time the door was bricked up. To throw a crumb to sanity, I’ll say that there may be a secret door there today, though what its use would be I can’t say; but I’ve never been able to find such a thing, and to the best of my knowledge it’s just a bricked-up door.
“Mrs. Henderson wanted to emphasize that there was no possibility of mistake or deception or trickery about what she saw; she saw the Greuze head on the wall, hung in the middle of where the door used to be; she saw all things between, and the top of the high-backed chair as well. She even noted Miles’s clothing neatly hung up across the top of the chair. … But that door in the wall was opening, and the woman in the Marquise de Brinvilliers dress was going out by it.
“The door moved outwards; the Greuze head moved with it; and the door touched the back of the chair while the woman slipped through. Hitherto it had been the immobility of the woman which was somewhat terrifying. But now that she did move—or glided, rather—the movement was equally bad. Mrs. Henderson was scared half to death, and I don’t know that I blame her. I tried to ask her something about the door; did it have a knob, for instance? Which would have been the important thing if it were an honest secret door with a concealed spring somewhere. But she couldn’t remember. Still, she never saw the woman’s face; and the door closed. A second later it was exactly the solid wall she had known. It changed back again: that’s the only way she could express it.
“She went over to the radio and for the first time she shut off the Ingelford Soothing Hour before its end. Then she sat down and tried to think. Finally she went up boldly to the glass door, and rapped on it, and said, ‘I’ve heard enough of the radio for tonight. Is there anything you’d like?’ And Miles sang out in a quiet voice, not angry in the least, ‘Nothing at all, thanks. Go down and get some sleep; you must be tired.’ So she took her nerve in both hands, and said: ‘Who was that in there with you? I thought I heard voices.’ He laughed and said: ‘You must be dreaming; there’s nobody in here. Run along!’ But she thought that his voice was shaky.
“And she was, frankly, afraid to stay in the house any longer. So she ran down here. Now I’ve told you how we found Miles dying, later, at two-thirty, and the cup I found—all of it. Mrs. H. came to me next morning, still frightened, and told me the story secretly. When she learned the sort of dress Lucy had been wearing that night, she didn’t know what to think. Also, remember, she still doesn’t know Miles was poisoned. Now, with the body having vanished out of the coffin, there’s something more to show that neither of us is insane. As I say, there may be a secret door in that wall. But, unless it leads to a secret passage or something going down between the walls, where does the door lead to? That’s the back wall of the house, with the windows in it. Finally, I’m certain at least that there’s no secret passage in the crypt. There’s your problem, Part, and I’ve tried to make it as little sensational as I can. Does it mean anything to you?”
Again there was a pause.
“That’s the story she told me, all right,” volunteered Henderson, rocking glumly. “And, my Lord, the trouble I had with her when we had to sit up all night with Mr. Miles’s body before the funeral! She got me almost seeing things myself.”
“Ted,” Mark spoke out, abruptly, “what’s keeping you so quiet all evening? What’s the matter with you, anyhow? You’re sitting over there like a stuffed horse; and everybody’s had a try at suggesting something except you. What do you think?”
Stevens pulled himself together. He thought he had better show signs of interest; yes, and go over theories, if only because there was a piece of information he must have without appearing to get it. He dived after his tobacco-pouch, and polished his pipe against his wrist.
“You asked for it,” he said, “so let’s try. Let’s take what Partington would call the only possible alternatives. Can you stand having a case made out against Lucy, as the police might do it? You understand I don’t any more believe Lucy would do such a thing than I believe that—that Marie would, for instance.” He chuckled, and Mark nodded as though the comparison took a weight off his mind.
“Oh, I can stand it. Fire away.”
“First, then, there’s the theory that Lucy gave him arsenic in that silver cup: and afterwards left the room by a secret door, or by some mechanism we can’t at the moment understand. Second, there’s the theory that somebody was impersonating Lucy, wearing a similar dress because she knew what Lucy wore that night; that the open chinks in the curtain were left not accidentally, but deliberately; that Mrs. Henderson was intended by the murderer to look through and see the figure of a woman with her back turned, so that afterwards she could swear it was Lucy——”
“Ah!” said Mark. “Good!”
“Third and last, there’s the theory that this business actually is… we won’t say supernatural, because people fight shy of the word… but un-dead and un-human and on the other side of a threshold.”
Partington let his hand fall with a smack on the table. “You, too?”
“No, not necessarily. I’m like Mark: I believe we ought to consider every theory even if we only demolish it. That’s to say, don’t throw out plain evidence just because its conclusion suggests something we can’t believe. So long as it remains plain evidence, that can be seen and touched and handled, treat it exactly as you would treat any other sort of evidence. Suppose Mrs. Henderson said she saw Lucy (or Edith, or any woman we know) giving Miles a poisoned cup. Then suppose she said the cup was given him by a woman dead for over two hundred years. Well, treat the actual evidence with no more or less disbelief, and do Lucy at least the justice to admit the two theories are equally incredible. If you’re talking of pure actual evidence, there’s more evidence to show this thing was supernatural than it was natural.”
Partington regarded him with sceptical pleasantry. “The academic sophistry, eh? I feel I ought to put my feet up on the table and call for beer. Go ahead.”
“Take the first theory,” Stevens went on. He bit the stem of his pipe; he knew that, in this rush to get things off his chest, he would have to control himself sharply so as not to say too much. But the deluge had to come out, and it steadied his voice. “Lucy is guilty, then. The objection is that she has a sound alibi. Now, she was with you all evening, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, practically. Or with others who could swear to her identity,” said Mark, with emphasis. “That is, she couldn’t have gone away without my knowing it.”
“Well, were you masked?”
“Yes. That was a part of the idea; we were supposed to keep all the others guessing as to who we w—” Mark stopped suddenly, and his pale-blue eyes grew fixed.
“When did you take off the masks?”
“The usual time; midnight.”
“And the poison was administered, if it was administered at all,” said Stevens, drawing lines in the air with his pipe-stem, “at fifteen minutes after eleven. And a person could go from here to St. Davids in much less than three quarters of an hour, in time for the unmasking. So the policeman in a detective story says to himself, ‘What if the woman her husband saw, and the guests at the party saw, wasn’t Lucy Despard at all; and two women in Brinvilliers dresses switched identities before the unmasking?”
Mark sat motionless. “You asked me whether I could take it, and I’m taking it. God damn it, man, do you think I wouldn’t know my own wife, in whatever kind of masquerade? Do you think others wouldn’t know her? They were only domino-masks; they don’t fool friends to any extent. Do you think…”
“Certainly I don’t think it,” Stevens returned, testily and truthfully. “Nor will anybody else. That’s your trump card; you could bring a dozen witnesses to show it, whereas… But I was only piling up the thing, and giving it its worst look, to show you that there’s nothing in it at its worst; and that if you only examine it without the goblins you’ll see there’s nothing in it. Don’t go down so easily under a poser. There are harder posers in this world. Besides—” He stopped with a new idea turning in his mind. If it were possible to handle it properly, it might throw dust and blame nobody: which was what he wished. “Besides, among the alternatives I’ve suggested there’s another which doesn’t seem to have occurred to us. What if there was no murder? What if the woman, supernatural or natural, had nothing whatever to do with the business, and Miles died just as the doctor said he did?”
Partington rubbed his chin. Something seemed to be bothering him as he studied Stevens covertly; he shifted and frowned, half-amused as though at something too foolish to bring up.
“I’d like to see it turn out that way,” Partington said. “So would all of us, I think; it would be the easiest way. But—what about the body disappearing from the crypt? You can make a small bet that that’s too solid to be supernatural. Besides, you would never get the police to believe that the business of the woman with a cupful of arsenic was (a) a harmless ghost-story, or (b) a harmless prank of dressing-up.”
“The police aren’t going to have the chance,” snapped Mark. “Let’s go on with your alternatives, Ted. Second, some one impersonating Lucy.”
“You answer it. Who could do that?”
“Anybody. Provided,” Mark insisted, tapping the table, “provided you can imagine it in connection with any of our ordinary, harmless, good-natured group—why, anybody. But that’s what I can’t swallow. Lucy in the role isn’t much more crazy a conception than Edith. Or Margaret, the maid. Or—” He reflected. “Here’s one thing I’ve always wondered, when I’ve read accounts of murder cases; especially about the sober, quiet, respectable little fellow who goes around for twenty years tipping his hat and paying his insurance, and then all of a sudden, without changing, he kills somebody and cuts the body up into pieces to hide it. I don’t ask what made him do it—but I’d like to know what his family and his friends think about him. Do they see any change, or blink in the eye; is he changed for them? He doesn’t wear his hat any differently; he still likes mock-turtle soup. Isn’t he still just John K. Johnson, and nothing else?”
“You’ve answered your own question,” said Partington, grimly, “about the impossibility of thinking of any of your own crowd as a murderer.”
“Yes, but try to be human! For instance, do you think that Edith could be a murderer?”
Partington shrugged. “She might be. If she were, I’d cover her up, which is more than— But Edith’s out of my life now; she’s been out of it for ten years; and I can take an impersonal view. I’m trying to look at it scientifically. You and Lucy, or Edith and I, or Stevens and——”
“Marie,” supplied Mark.
Stevens was conscious of an uneasiness when he met Partington’s gaze, although it was free and ordinary, as of a man taking casual examples.
“Yes, I thought I’d heard the name,” said the doctor, lightly. “What I was trying to say was, any of us, scientifically considered, might commit murder. It’s a plain fact.”
“You could believe that,” muttered Mark, slowly, as though he were turning over a problem apart from the present, “and yet you couldn’t believe anything supernatural exists. To me it’s the first alternative that’s a staggerer. As for the supernatural, I frankly don’t know and I’m frankly inclined to doubt. But, funny thing, to me it’s more credible than seeing one of us as a murderer.”
“Look here, let’s take the third alternative for just a second,” insisted Stevens, “even if we don’t believe it. Let’s assume that there’s something of the non-dead about it, and apply the same rules of evidence we did to the other two. …”
“Why,” asked Mark, “do you say the ‘non-dead’?”
Stevens stared at him, and met Mark’s bright and steady eyes of interest. He was not conscious of having made any slip of speech; yet the word slipped out naturally where it was not one he might naturally have chosen. His mind groped back: Cross’s manuscript. The story he had been reading there, attached to the photograph, had been called The Affair of the Non-Dead Mistress. Was that why it had stuck in his mind?
“I asked,” said Mark, “because I’ve found only one other person who used the term. Funny. Most people say ghosts, or some synonym. Then there’s another class, the vampires, that in mythological lore are called the un-dead. But the ‘non-dead’! Yes, funny. I’ve come across only one other person who used that term.”
“Who?”
“Uncle Miles, oddly enough. It cropped up in a conversation I had with Welden a couple of years ago—you know Welden, at the College?—yes. We were sitting out in the garden one Saturday morning, and the talk had gone from gardens to galleons to ghosts, in the way it does. So far as I can remember, Welden was enumerating the various forms and types of things that go bump in the night. Up strolled Miles, looking more far-away than ever, and listened for a couple of minutes without saying anything. Then he said… it’s a long time ago, and I only remember because it sounded odd coming from Miles, who never read a book in his life… he said something like: ‘There’s one separate type you’ve forgotten, sir. That’s the non-dead.’ I said: ‘What do you mean, the non-dead, except in the sense that everything alive is non-dead? Welden’s alive, and I’m alive; but I don’t think I’m non-dead.’ Miles looked at me in a vague sort of way and said, ‘How do you know?’ Then he wandered away, Welden evidently thought he was a little bughouse, and changed the subject. I forgot all about it. But I remembered—non-dead! What does it mean? Where did you get hold of it?”
“Oh, I came across it in a book somewhere,” growled Stevens, dismissing the subject. “We don’t want to get mixed up in a choice of words. Ghosts, if you like the term better. You said the house never had a reputation for having a ghost in it?”
“Never.—Of course, I myself might have my own views of things that have happened here in the past; but, as Part will tell you, that’s because I’m a wild-eyed cuss who could see murder in green-apple colic.”
“Then what the devil,” demanded Stevens, “is your link with anything wild-eyed out of the past: your link with the Marquise de Brinvilliers, for one thing? You told me tonight the family was closely associated with her. You talk about a portrait, with the face gone from acid, that’s supposed to be her. Edith doesn’t seem to like the picture, and prefers to call it ‘Madame de Montespan’ when Lucy copies the costume for a masquerade; and Mrs. Henderson doesn’t even like to say its name. What’s the connection between a murderess in the seventeenth century and the Despards in the twentieth?… Was a ‘Desprez’ one of her victims, by any chance?”
“No,” said Mark. “Something more respectable and law-abiding than that. A Desprez caught her.”
“Caught her?”
“Yes. Madame de Brinvilliers had fled from Paris and the law, which was howling after her. She had taken refuge in a convent at Liège; and, so long as she stayed inside the convent, they could not take her. But clever Desprez, as a representative of the French government, found a way around that. He was a handsome dog, and Marie de Brinvilliers (as you may have read) could never resist a strutting sword and periwig. Desprez went into the convent piously disguised as a priest; he met the lady, set her a-burning for him, and then suggested that they should go outside for a little walk by the river. She went eagerly, but it was a different sort of assignation from what she had expected. Desprez whistled, and the guard closed in. Within a few hours she was on the way to Paris in a closed coach, amid an escort of cavalry. She was beheaded and burnt in 1676.” Mark paused, and began to roll a cigarette. “He was a virtuous soul who had made a thrifty and well-deserved capture of a murderess who deserved to die. He was also, to my way of thinking, a black-souled Judas just the same. … He was the honored Desprez who, five years later, came to America with Crispen and laid the first timbers of the Park. He died in 1706, and the crypt was built for him to rest his bones.”
In the same stolid voice Stevens asked, “How did he die?”
“Of natural causes, so far as is known. The only curious thing is that a woman, who could never afterwards be identified, appears to have visited him in his room before he died. It roused no suspicion and was probably a coincidence.”
Partington was amused. “Now you’re going to tell us, are you, that the room he occupied was the same as your uncle Miles’s room now?”
“No,” answered Mark gravely. “But the set of rooms he occupied then adjoined what is now Uncle Miles’s room. Access to the old Desprez’s rooms was gained through a door which was bricked-up and panelled-over when that wing of the house was burnt down about 1707.”
… There was a sharp knock at the door of the little living-room. The door opened, and Lucy Despard walked in.
That knock had brought Henderson’s rocking-chair skittering against the radio again. That knock had brought them all to their feet, for they had heard no footsteps. Lucy Despard was pale, and she seemed to have dressed hurriedly for travel.
“So they’ve opened the crypt,” she said. “So they’ve opened the crypt.”
Mark fumbled before he found his voice. He moved forward, making soothing gestures in the air. “It’s quite all right, Lucy,” he told her. “It’s quite all right We’ve opened the crypt. Just a little——”
“Mark, you know it isn’t all right. Please tell me. What’s going on? Where are the police?”
Her husband stopped, and so, in one way, did the others; everything appeared to stop except the bustling little clock on the mantelpiece. After a moment during which Stevens felt his wits thicken, Mark said:
“Police? What police? What are you talking about?”
“We came as soon as we could,” Lucy said, rather piteously. “There was a late train from New York, and we managed to get a late train out here. Edith will be down in a second. Mark, what’s the matter? Look here.”
She opened her handbag, took out a telegram, and handed it to him. He read it twice before he read it aloud to the others.
Mrs. Mark Despard,
c/o Mrs. E. R. Leverton,
31 East 64th St.,
New York.
DISCOVERY RELATING CIRCUMSTANCES MILES DESPARD’S DEATH. SUGGEST YOU RETURN HOME IMMEDIATELY.
Brennan, Philadelphia Police Dept.
Stevens never forgot Lucy Despard standing just inside the open door, her hand on the knob, with the great elms behind her, and the lanterns still burning on the path. Lucy’s calm, alert, good-humored face had a strength about it: it was the alertness you first noticed in the light-brown, shining eyes, with very dark lashes, which were her best feature. She was small, and rather sturdy, but with an unconscious grace; nor was she exactly a beauty, except in the attractiveness and vigor of her expression. Now she was so pale that a few freckles stood out. She wore a plain tailored suit which contrived to suggest fashion without your knowing why; there was a touch of color only in her plain close-fitting hat, and the black hair was worn low over her ears.
Thus she stood while Mark read the telegram again.
“This is a hoax of some kind,” said Stevens. “That telegram’s a fake. No police officer would send a nice courteous message like that, inviting you to come home like a family lawyer. He’d phone New York and have them see you.—Mark, there’s something damned fishy about this.”
“You’re telling me,” said Mark, explosively. He took a few steps up and down the room. “Yes; whoever sent that telegram, it wasn’t a cop. Let’s see. Handed in at a Western Union office in Market Street at 7:35. That doesn’t tell us much. …”
“But what is wrong?” cried Lucy. “The crypt’s open. Aren’t they here? Aren’t—” She looked over Mark’s shoulder, and stopped. “Tom Partington!” she said, blankly.
“Hello, Lucy,” said Partington, with ease. He moved forward from the mantelpiece, and she mechanically gave him her hand. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“It has, Tom. But what on earth are you doing here? I thought you were in England. You haven’t changed much. Yes, you have—a little.”
Partington made the customary remarks. It appeared that Lucy and Mark had not been married at the time he went away. “Only a flying visit,” he explained. “I got in this afternoon. I thought, after ten years, you wouldn’t mind putting me up for a couple of days. …”
“No, of course not! We’re—” Again mechanically, Lucy glanced over her shoulder as though wondering how to deal with something. They all heard the footsteps now, and Edith came in.
Edith had more of a glitter about her, although at the same time she carried herself more consciously. It was not that she had grown stiff or at all fussy when only a year or more into her thirties; it was only that you were never quite so certain of her, or the movements of her mind, as you were with Lucy; and Stevens did not like to think what she might be in twenty years’ time. She was taller than Lucy, and more slender in a thin-boned fashion. She had the family carriage, the family looks—the brown hair, the blue eyes, the air of brushing things aside as Mark did—and she was very good-looking, though inclined to become a trifle hollow round the eyes. It was noticeable that Henderson, as soon as she came in, backed away and began to assume a guilty look. Yet Stevens had often had a curious impression that she somehow concealed more weakness than her decisive actions would indicate. She wore a fur coat, and no hat; she was dressed (how could you describe it?) fluently. And when she saw Partington she stopped, but her expression did not change.
“Edith,” said Lucy, hurriedly opening and shutting the catch of her handbag, “they say there’s nothing wrong. They say that telegram’s a fake and there are no police here at all.”
But Edith was looking at Partington, and she smiled at him.
“This time,” she announced, in a pleasant voice, “I can honestly say that one of my premonitions has come true. You do bring trouble with you, don’t you?”
And she extended her left hand. Then she looked round the group.
“You’ve all been entrusted with the secret,” she said. “Well, Mark, what is it? Lucy and I have been horribly worried, and we may as well know.”
“It’s a joke, I tell you. That telegram——”
“Mark,” she said, “was Uncle Miles poisoned?”
A pause. “Poisoned? Good God, no! What put that idea into your head?” Mark looked at her face, which was more composed than Lucy’s, but she was under no less a strain. And then Mark’s nimble brain hit on a fairly shrewd lie, to be used on the spur of the moment. He put his arm round Lucy, patting her on the back, and then turned again to Edith with a deprecating air. “You’ll know it sooner or later, so you might as well know now. It’s no real trouble, no foolish business like murder. … Where did you get the idea, I wonder?… and nothing to concern the police. But it’s not pleasant. Somebody has a taste for sending fake telegrams—and letters. I got a letter, too—anonymous. It said that Uncle Miles’s body had been stolen out of the crypt.” Evidently aware that this lie sounded thin, he went on hurriedly: “I mightn’t have paid much attention to it if Henderson hadn’t noticed a few queer things. We decided to open the crypt and see. And I’m sorry to tell you, Edith, it’s true. The body’s gone.”
If anything, Edith seemed more nervous than before. She did not appear to doubt him, but it was clear that the news gave no reassurance.
“Gone?” she repeated. “But how could it—why—I mean…?”
Partington interposed smoothly, taking up the cue.
“Yes, it’s a bad business,” he said, “but it’s not new, though I don’t believe the racket has been tried in America for over fifty years. Did you ever hear, Edith, of the Stewart case in 1878? The body of the millionaire was stolen out of his tomb and held for ransom. The same thing happened at Dunecht; they burgled a crypt there, very much like this one. It’s something our modern racketeers don’t seem to have thought of.”
“But that’s horrible!” cried Lucy. “Kidnapping a dead body—for ransom?”
“Mrs. Stewart offered twenty-five thousand dollars to get it back.” Partington was speaking easily, fixing their minds, turning them away as though he led them by the hand. “In the Dunecht case, they caught one of the gang and found the body. The trial was peculiar because there were no precedents in law. Every case of body-snatching recorded up to that time had been for the purpose of selling the body to a medical school; but this was different. I believe the man got five years. … In this case, I suppose they’ve got it into their heads that you are a family who want to keep the old crusted vault intact, and that you’ll pay through the nose to get your uncle’s body back again.”
Lucy drew a deep breath, disengaged Mark’s arm, and leaned on the table.
“Well, at least it’s better than—you know—the other thing. Yes, and I’ll admit it: it’s a relief. Edith, you had me horribly scared.” She laughed at herself, for her evident feeling of relief had her almost on the point of tears. “Of course we’ll have to tell the police now, but——”
“We’ll do nothing of the kind. Do you think,” said Mark, “that I want poor old Miles’s body knocked around now like a dead fox with a pack of hounds on it? Yah! Not likely. If body-snatchers have taken it, as Part says, then I’m willing to pay to avoid a rumpus. Now cheer up, both of you.”
“I might as well tell you,” said Edith, very gently, “that I don’t believe one word of it.”
Was there such a thing, Stevens wondered, as a handsome hag? The term was over-strong to a ludicrous extent, for hag would be the last word you might apply to Edith; but it conveyed the idea of a handsome woman whose doubts shadowed her face in that fashion.
“You don’t?” said Mark. “You don’t still have those hallucinations about poison, do you?”
“Please come up to the house,” Edith urged. She looked at Henderson. “Joe, it’s very cold up there. Will you make up a fire in the furnace?”
“Yes’m. Right away,” said Henderson, meekly.
“It’s getting late,” began Stevens, “and if you’ll excuse me——”
Edith turned quickly. “No! You must come along, Ted; you must. We must thrash it out, all of us; Mark, make him come along. Don’t you see there’s something wicked, really wicked in this? Whoever sent that telegram is playing with us and laughing at us; it’s no gangsters who want to steal a body for money. Why should anyone send a telegram like that? I’ve had a feeling something like this was going to happen, ever since—” She stopped, and looked out again to where the two lanterns were burning, and shivered.
It was a quiet group which went up the path. Partington tried to talk to Edith; but, although there was no outward constraint between them, there was a wall between, nevertheless. Lucy alone seemed inclined to treat the matter as no very deadly thing; as unpleasant and even terrible, but as nothing that need throw the world out of focus. “Whoever sent that telegram is playing with us and laughing at us”—these were the words of which Stevens kept thinking.
They went into the house, and through the big hall to the library at the front. It was the wrong sort of room to have chosen for such a conference; it put the past, and the odors of the past, too much in the midst of them. The library was very long and broad, but not very high, with a raftered ceiling. The walls had been plastered over and calcimined a dull green, to freshen it up with modernness; but the original room broke out in odd nooks and corners, including the fireplace. Edith sat down in an overstuffed chair by a bright lamp, with the shuttered windows for a background. To the rarefied modern taste which sees beauty in the present style of decoration, it would also have seemed cluttered with odds and ends gathered by Miles or Mark from travels in far places: but the gusty seventeenth-century, with its fondness for toys and gauds, would have felt at home in it.
“Listen, Edith,” urged Lucy, “must you bring all this up? I don’t like the way you’re going on; I didn’t like what you were saying, coming out in the train. Can’t we just forget it, and——”
“Well, we can’t,” said Edith, shortly. “You know as well as I do the rumor is all over the place that there’s something wrong here.”
Mark whistled. “Rumor?”
“And if you ask me who started it,” said Edith, “I should say it was Margaret… oh, unintentionally, I admit. Something just—slipped. She may have heard the nurse talking to me, or the nurse to the doctor. Don’t look so surprised, Mark. Did you know that that nurse was suspicious of us all the time she was here, and that’s why she kept her room locked up whenever she wasn’t in it?”
Mark whistled again. He glanced uneasily at Partington and Stevens. “Deeps,” he said, “within deeps. Or wheels, or—Everybody seems to be keeping back something. Suspicious of us? Why?”
“Because,” answered Edith, “some one stole something out of her room.”
“I wish you wouldn’t keep dribbling out bits of information.” Mark spoke rather irritably, after a silence. “You always used to speak out hot and strong. Stole what? When? Why?”
“It was the week-end before Uncle Miles died—the Saturday. I think it was the 8th.” She looked at Stevens. “You remember, Ted? You and Marie were up here to play bridge; only Mark broke up the whole affair, and for some reason it degenerated into telling ghost stories?”
“I remember,” said Lucy. She was trying to disguise her uneasiness with a pleased expression. “Mark had taken one too many highballs, that was the reason. But why do you say ‘degenerated’ into telling ghost stories? It was good fun.”
Edith went on: “The next morning Miss Corbett came to me and said she seemed to have mislaid something. I thought she talked a little snappishly, and asked what it was. She became more definite. She asked me whether anyone had accidentally taken something from her room; something the doctor had ordered for Miles in such-and-such an event (she didn’t specify what). She described it as a small square bottle. Finally, she added that it could be of no use to anybody, that it was a deadly poison if given in quantity, and that if somebody had taken it in mistake for smelling-salts—which she thought wasn’t very likely—it would be a kindness to return it. Just like that. I don’t think she was suspicious, exactly. She thought somebody had been monkeying about.”
Mark almost slipped. Stevens saw that it was on the tip of his tongue to say, “But they wouldn’t keep arsenic for a medicinal purpose”; he opened his mouth, but shut it in time. Mark looked at Partington in a puzzled way, and then back to Lucy. “Did you hear anything of this, Lucy?”
“No.” She was troubled. “But that’s not surprising, is it? I mean, they naturally go to Edith rather than me; anybody would. If I were somebody else, I shouldn’t go to me—if you understand.”
Mark stared round.
“But damn it all, somebody must have—” He stopped. “What did you say to Miss Corbett, Edith? What did you do?”
“I said I’d make enquiries.”
“And did you?”
“No.” The weakness, the doubt, the indecision, came back to Edith’s practical face; she would run up to the breach, clanging arms, but she always hesitated there. “I suppose I was… afraid. Oh, I know it sounds silly, but I was. I don’t mean I didn’t say anything; I threw out enquiries, in a casual way, as though I were talking about a bottle of Uncle Miles’s medicine; and nobody connected the two. I didn’t mention poison. I couldn’t.”
“This is a devil of a mess,” said Mark, “but it couldn’t have been ar… h’m. Here, Part, this is a job for you. What sort of stuff could it have been?”
Partington frowned. “Depends on the doctor’s ideas as to possible developments in the case; I haven’t heard his own complete diagnosis. But it might have been several things. Just a minute! Tell me, Edith, did the nurse report this to the doctor?”
“Doctor Baker? Yes, of course. So, naturally, I didn’t think——”
“And Doctor Baker had no hesitation about saying your uncle died of gastro-enteritis? He had no suspicion, in other words?”
“None at all!”
“Then,” said Partington, curtly, “stop worrying. You can take it from me that it couldn’t have been any medical preparation which could possibly have caused the same symptoms as your uncle died with—like antimony, for instance. Isn’t that obvious? Otherwise both the doctor and the nurse would have been on to it immediately. … No; probably it was a sedative, or else a heart-stimulant like digitalin or strychnine. Those things can be deadly, as you know; but all of them are what are called neurotic poisons; and—again take it from me—not one of them could have caused the symptoms with which your uncle died. Far from it! So what are you worrying about?”
“I know,” murmured Edith, miserably, and scratched her nails up and down the arm of the chair. “I know that, I told myself that all the time, and I knew it couldn’t be. Nobody would do a thing like that!” She smiled, or tried to. “But with Miss Corbett locking her door every time she went out of her room afterwards, and even locking it on the night Miles died, after the little bottle had been returned…”
“Returned?” said Mark, quickly. “Yes; that’s what I was going to ask you. What happened to the bottle? Baker didn’t just let it float round the house, and laugh ha-ha, did he? You say it was returned?”
“Yes. Evidently on the Sunday night. It was gone only twenty-four hours, you see, so there wasn’t time for a real fuss or hue-and-cry. Yes, it was the Sunday night; I remember because Marie had just been up to say hello and good-bye, that she and Ted were driving to New York next morning. I went out of my room about nine o’clock, and met Miss Corbett in the upstairs hall. She said: ‘Thank some one for me; the bottle has been returned. Some one put it on the table outside Mr. Despard’s, meaning Miles’s, door.’ I said, ‘Is everything all right?’ She said, ‘Yes, everything seems all right.’”
“Then I see it,” declared Mark. “It means that Miles himself stole them.”
“Miles himself?” repeated Edith, blankly.
“Exactly,” said Mark, afire with a new idea. “Now tell me, Part, could that bottle have contained morphia tablets?”
“Yes, certainly. You say he had been in considerable pain, and wasn’t sleeping well.”
“And you remember,” cried Mark, turning on the others and pointing his finger, “that Uncle Miles was always wanting more morphia than the doctor would give him, when he had the pains? Right! Now suppose Miles stole the bottle out of the nurse’s room, lifted a few tablets—and returned it? Here, wait a minute! On the night he died he called out for somebody to go down to the bathroom and get the ‘tablets that would ease pain,’ didn’t he? Suppose those were the stolen morphia tablets, which he put into the medicine-chest in the bathroom so the nurse wouldn’t find them in his own room?”
“No, that won’t work,” said Lucy. “There were no morphia tablets there. Those were only the ordinary veronal tablets we keep there all the time.”
“All right; but does the other part of it sound reasonable?”
“Yes, it’s entirely possible,” agreed Partington.
“What is the matter with all of you?” asked Edith. She spoke in a calm tone; but then, unexpectedly, her voice went up almost to a scream. “Don’t you see what is happening? The first thing you tell me is that Uncle Miles’s body has been stolen. Stolen!—taken out of that vault and maybe chopped up or heaven knows what; and that’s the least, the easiest thing, that could have happened. Yet you all take it very calmly, and try to hoodwink me with gentle talk. Oh yes, you do. I know it. Even you do, Lucy. I won’t stand it. I want to know what’s going on, because I know it’s something horrible. I’ve been through too much in the last two weeks. Tom Partington, why do you want to come back and torture me? All we need now is Ogden making jokes, and it would be complete, wouldn’t it? I tell you I won’t stand it.”
Her hands were shaking, and so was her neck: it was the handsome hag come back again, fluttering on the edge of tears in the big chair. Lucy was regarding her with steadily shining brown eyes: Stevens noted the steady shining of that look, as of a sympathy too great to be expressed. Mark lumbered over and put his hand on her shoulder.
“You’ll be all right, old girl,” he said, gently. “You need one of those veronal tablets yourself; and a lot of sleep; that’s all. Why not go upstairs with Lucy, and she’ll give you one. You trust to us—whatever has happened, we’ll handle it. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, I know it,” Edith replied, after a silence. “It was silly of me to fly up like that; but, really, I feel better for it. You can’t help the thoughts that come sometimes.” (An echo of Mark himself.) “I know I shouldn’t lay any foolish claim to being psychic, although a gipsy woman once told me I was; but, Lucy, I knew it was unlucky of you to make a copy of that dress in the picture, and wear it. It’s always been considered unlucky. I know we’re supposed to have outgrown all that, and yet I shouldn’t like to go through the world balancing common sense like a pail of water on my head, and not dare to bend my back or turn my head in case the pail should spill. Still, it’s a plain scientific fact, isn’t it, that the changes of the moon have a direct bearing on certain types of human brain?”
“For the moon is the mother of lunatics,” said Partington, dreamily, “and has given to them her name.—Some say so.”
“You always were a materialistic soul, Tom. Still, there’s truth in it. And is there anything queerer or more outlandish in the supernatural,”—at this point Stevens saw the expressions on his companions’ faces change; he had no doubt his own did as well—“than,” said Edith, “that somebody’s mind should be affected from umpty-million miles away by a—well, a——”
“A piece of green cheese,” said Partington. “I suppose not, but why this mysticism?”
“Because I hope you’ll laugh me out of it. I want,” said Edith, grimly, “to see a piece of green cheese. Remember, Lucy, there was a full moon on the night Uncle Miles died; and how we admired it; and you and Mark sang coming home? When a person begins to think about the non-dead…”
Mark spoke as quickly and heartily as though he had never heard the term; but his voice was, if anything, a trifle too loud. “The what? Here, where did you pick up that rubbish?”
“Oh, I read it in a book somewhere. … I’ll not go upstairs, but I will go out and find something to eat. Come on, Lucy. I’m tired; I’m dreadfully tired. Will you make some sandwiches?”
Lucy bounced up briskly, and winked at Mark over her shoulder. When they had gone, Mark prowled twice round the room with moody absorption before he stopped by the fireplace and began to roll a cigarette. Somewhere in the room a concealed radiator began to rattle and whack as Henderson in the cellar got up steam.
“We’re all keeping something back from one another,” Mark said, and flicked a match across the stone. “You notice that Miles’s body disappearing didn’t seem to startle them—or at least Edith—overly. They didn’t want details. They didn’t want to peep. They didn’t want to… Oh, damn it, what’s in Edith’s mind? The same thing that’s occurred to us? Or is it only night-time and the jimjams? I wish I knew.”
“I can tell you,” growled Partington.
“And she read it in a book, too. The non-dead. She read it in a book, the same as you did.” He looked at Stevens. “I suppose it was the same book?”
“It couldn’t very well be. This one is still in manuscript. It’s Cross’s new one—Gaudan Cross. You’ve read some of his stuff, haven’t you?”
Mark stopped. The match was still burning in his hand as he stared at the other; he held it levelly, and, as though at some instinct beyond sight, just before it burnt his fingers he twitched it out. But he continued to look at Stevens with eyes wide open.
“Spell that name,” he requested. Then he said: “It can’t be. You’re right, Part; I am getting the jimjams, and very shortly my imagination will put me in a state where I need a sedative myself. The proof of it is that I’ve seen that name dozens of times, and yet it never occurred to me (in my right senses) to see any resemblance before. Gaudan Cross… Gaudin St. Croix. Ho-ho-ho! Give me a kick, somebody.”
“Well, what about it?”
“Don’t you see?” demanded Mark, with a sort of ghoulish eagerness and mirth. “When you get into such a business as this, all you’ve got to do is let your imagination run and it’ll see anything you like. Here’s Gaudan Cross, probably a harmless old son of a what not, who writes pretty good stuff; and yet by looking at that name you can construct a whole cycle of the non-dead, and a return for ever of the slayers and the slain. … Gaudan Cross. Gaudin St. Croix, in case it interests you, was the celebrated lover of Marie D’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers, who first instructed her in all the arts of poison. He died before her; in his laboratory over his own poison-kettle; otherwise he’d have been broken to death on the wheel, or sent to the stake by the tribunal they established to deal with poisoning cases—a tribunal called The Burning Court. It was through St. Croix’s death that they discovered evidence, in a certain teakwood box, which led Madame to be suspected. She had grown tired of him, and had grown to hate him; but that’s neither here nor there. St. Croix died somehow. … Dumas says he was trying to manufacture a poison gas when his glass mask slipped and he fell forward dead of its fumes with his head in his own cauldron… and the hunt was up for Madame la Marquise.”
“I’ve had about enough of this for one night,” said Stevens, curtly. “If you don’t mind, I’ll get along home now, and we can wall up that tomb in the morning.”
Partington looked at him. “It’s a fine night,” Partington said. “I’ll walk down as far as the gate with you.”
They walked down the drive, under great trees and past places of shrubbery. For a time both Partington and Stevens were silent. Mark had gone out for a last conference with Henderson, and to put the tarpaulin used for the tennis court over the entrance to the crypt. Stevens wondered what (if anything) was on Partington’s mind; so he opened the attack.
“Any ideas about the theft and return of the bottle,” he asked, “beyond what you told the women?”
“Eh?” Partington roused out of his abstraction. He had been looking up at the starlight, shuffling his feet on the gravel as though to pick up the way. Now he considered. “Well, as I told you, I like to get things down on regular charts. We know that a small bottle, containing something which in a large dose would be a deadly poison, was stolen and afterwards returned. That’s all we know, and all we’re likely to know until we see that nurse. We don’t even know whether it was in liquid or solid form, which is the most important point.
“But there are two possibilities as to what the stuff might have been. First, it might have been a heart-stimulant like strychnine or digitalin. If that’s so—well, frankly, it’s very bad. It might mean that the poisoner (if there is a poisoner) hasn’t finished his work.”
Stevens nodded.
“Yes,” he said, “I’d thought of that, too.”
“But I can tell you,” said Partington, dryly, “that it isn’t a very likely possibility. If anything like that had been stolen, the doctor would have had the house pulled apart until that sort of stuff was found or accounted for. Neither he nor the nurse seems to have been unduly disturbed. Irritated, rather; do you follow me? Similarly, what was stolen couldn’t have been an irritant poison like antimony, for instance, or you can bet your last dollar they’d never have given a death-certificate testifying that Miles died of natural causes.
“No. Our second possibility is much more likely. Our second possibility is Mark’s theory that a few morphia tablets were stolen.”
“By Miles?”
Partington scowled. This point seemed to bother him more than any other.
“Yes, it’s quite possible. And it’s the easiest way out. We’re all looking for easy ways, aren’t we?” The pouched eyes turned round in the starlight, curiously. “But there are a few points against tacking it on Miles. There’s the return of the bottle. Now, we know that Miles’s room was next to the nurse’s. We know that, after the bottle was stolen, the nurse kept her door locked—that is, the door to the hall. But there was another door, communicating directly with Miles’s room, and presumably she didn’t keep that locked as well against her patient. So, if Miles stole the bottle and wanted to return it, why didn’t he walk through the communicating door and put it in her room? Why did he put it down on a table outside the door?”
“That’s easy to answer. Because the nurse would know right away who had done it. He would be the only one with access to her room.”
Partington stopped in the drive, and swore faintly.
“I’m getting soft-headed in my old age,” he said. “That’s plain, certainly. Also—look here, I was wondering whether the nurse might not have locked the communicating door to Miles’s room as well as the door to the hall. She may have suspected Miles as well.”
“Yes, but even so, what are you driving at?”
“The motive,” Partington insisted, doggedly. He made a slight movement of his hands in the air, as of an intelligent man who finds difficulty in articulation. “The reason why morphia was stolen. Either Miles stole it, or somebody else did. Now, if Miles stole it, the motive is understandable. But suppose someone else stole it? What could it have been used for?
“It couldn’t have been for another murder. A few tablets were stolen—two or three, perhaps. Not many more, or the doctor would have made a fuss about it. As a rule, morphia is given in quarter-grain tablets. It would take two or three grains to put a man in danger; four grains to make certain of the business. So it couldn’t have been for murder. Next, disregard the idea that anybody in the house is a drug-user. If that had been the case, you can be pretty certain the whole bottle would have been taken and never returned. Next, was somebody merely aching for a good night’s sleep? It’s possible; but in that case why use such strong stuff, that’ll blot you straight out and isn’t necessary unless you’re suffering? Why not take ordinary veronal tablets, such as were admittedly in the bathroom? In either case, why be so damned secretive as to STEAL the morphia?—So, if none of these things sounds reasonable, for what purpose did the thief want it?”
“Well?”
“Well, suppose you had a night’s work to do,” pursued the other, with toiling lucidity, “and there was somebody who might hear you or see you at it? If you dosed that person with a quarter-grain of morphia, the coast would be clear, wouldn’t it?”
Again he stopped and turned around, with a lowering frown under the starlight. His eyes fixed on Stevens, and the latter braced himself for what he thought was coming. As though in a picture he saw, in that moment, the night when Miles had been poisoned: the night when he and Marie were at the cottage less than a quarter of a mile away; the night when he himself had tumbled over with unaccountable drowsiness before ten-thirty.
Then Partington spoke unexpectedly.
“You see, I was thinking of our biggest problem—the opening of the crypt and the vanishing of the body. But if both Mr. and Mrs. Henderson had been dosed with morphia, would they have heard body-snatchers at work? Would they?”
“By God, that’s true!” Stevens exploded, with a violence of relief. He hesitated, nevertheless. “That is——”
“You mean that others in the big house might have heard the racket? And also that Henderson swears the entrance to the crypt hasn’t been disturbed? All right; admit he’s honest. But that’s not the only consideration. It’s true we made a lot of noise and a lot of mess. But remember what we did. We broke the paving-stones with wedges and hammers. Now remember how those stones are laid down. They’re rather thin pieces of crazy-paving, set together with mortar in the crevices like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle put together with glue. There’s no concrete, adhesive concrete, under them, only soil and gravel. Why couldn’t a whole piece of the paving have been cut out in one long block—and simply lifted up? It would require a little breaking of the mortar, but only one thin short line at either end. It could be tilted up on its side in one piece, and set down again like the stone slab under it. And Henderson, seeing an apparently whole pavement under him, could reasonably say what he did. You might make a mess taking out the soil and gravel. But remember that there were still traces of a mess from the opening of the crypt a week before.”
Stevens wanted to believe it as much as Partington evidently did. If any doubts stirred at the back of his mind, they were not ones at which he could coherently think. He was occupied with another sort of problem, a more personal one. He and Partington had now come to the gates of the park. They stopped to look down into the breezy dimness of King’s Avenue, where street lamps were far between, and the tarred surface of the road glistened in a black river underneath. Partington, who had lost some of his earlier diffidence, now went back to it. He added, more mildly:
“Sorry to talk so much. The point is, we’ve got to believe something. Edith’s told you that I’m a materialist. I don’t see any reason for being so scornful about that. I admit it. Edith told me a lot of things in the old days. She always believed that I performed the abortion on that girl because the business was my doing, and all because the kid worked in my office. Who was the materialist then, I ask you?”
That last drink, snatched before he left the house, had almost unlocked his tongue. A note of intensity would come up; and then, with equal suddenness, he would check himself in that way he had evidently learned so well.
“Yes, it’s true. A primrose by the river’s brim, a yellow primrose was to him: or to me at least: and not whatever it was the sage wanted me to see in it. It’s not a symbol of nature, or a mystic bud flowering into an excuse for bad verse. There are a lot of things more beautiful to look at—a running horse, for instance, or the skyline of New York. Your damned primrose is simply a tolerably pretty flower that might make an ornament in a bowl on the table. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes, I suppose I do.”
“And, consequently, all this talk about ghosts and non-deads and—” He stopped, with a lumbering smile, faintly short of breath. “I WILL shut up, in spite of myself,” he added. “You can depend on it, I’ve hit on the right explanation of the crypt. Unless, of course, there was some hocus-pocus on the part of the undertaker.”
“The undertaker,” repeated Stevens. “Do you mean J. Atkinson?”
He saw the doctor’s eyebrows raise. “Old Jonah? Yes. I suppose you know him; he’s quite a character. He must have buried several generations of Despards, and he’s a very old man now. That’s why our friend Henderson was so petulantly certain the undertaker couldn’t have gone in for any hocus-pocus: because it was Atkinson. Mark pointed out his place again to me as we were coming through tonight. Mark says old Jonah’s son has taken over the active work now, and is putting some ginger into the business. Old Jonah was a great favorite of Mark’s father; Mark’s father, with some sort of private joke, used to ask him whether he was still in his ‘blameless tea-shop,’ or his ‘corner’; I don’t know what he meant. Possibly— Oh, good-night.”
Stevens, convinced that the man had passed that hazy line of tipsiness which separates sense from wandering, had bidden him good-night and set off briskly down the avenue. The briskness was a pose. He wanted to be alone. He did not slow down his quick walk until he heard Partington’s own footsteps crunch away to silence up the drive.
Then he wanted to do something as a physical outlet for bewilderment: shake his fist, or hit something, or merely clench his teeth in hopeless perplexity. The whole thing was too intangible. If he could (as Partington wished to do) resolve these doubts into ruled lines, if he could have some cool-witted person stand in front of him and ask clear questions, he might understand better. He tried to ask himself the questions. Do you believe that there is something wrong with Marie? But how do you mean, wrong? In what particular way? And there was where the mind drew back, almost physically, as though from a fire; where the mind shut itself up. He could not answer the questions because he could not voice them. They were too fantastic. After all, through what odd crack in his brain had this idea been able to penetrate? Was there any actual evidence for it? It all centred round a photograph, not six square inches of cardboard; a similarity in names, a devilish similarity of feature—yes, and the fact that the photograph was missing. That was all.
He stood now before his own white cottage, staring at it. The light over the front door had been put out. There was no light anywhere in the house, except a red, shifting gleam through the window of the living-room. Evidently Marie had kindled a fire in the fireplace, which was curious, because she had a dread of fire. It gave him a vague sense of alarm.
The front door had been left on the latch. He opened it, and went into the dark hallway only faintly illumined by flickers from the living-room on the right. Nor was there any sound except the almost indistinguishable drawing and sizzling of the fire; green wood must have been used.
He called, “Marie!”
Still there was no sound. In the same sort of uneasiness he went into the living-room. Beyond any doubt the fire had been built of green wood; it was a large one, almost smothered in oily yellowish smoke through which little spiteful curls of flame wormed through. He heard its oozing hiss and pop. A little of the smoke spilled out over the hood of the stone fireplace. It was odd, he thought, how those split gleams distorted the familiar room, but there was light enough to see by the chimneypiece a tabouret bearing a plate of sandwiches, a thermos-bottle, and a cup.
“Marie!”
When he went out into the hall again, his footsteps seemed to fall so heavily on the floor that even the hardwood creaked. He brushed against the telephone table, and put his hand automatically on the briefcase still lying there. This time he could feel that the briefcase was open, the manuscript lying left askew inside, as though it had been taken out hurriedly and replaced.
“Marie!”
Even the treads of the stairs creaked noisily under him as he went up. A bedside lamp was burning in their room at the back of the house; but the room was empty and the lace coverlet of the bed undisturbed. On the mantelpiece a busy little clock animated the quiet: it was five minutes past three. Then he saw the envelope, propped up on the bureau.
DEAR TED [said the note]: I’ve got to go away for tonight. Our peace of mind depends on it. I’ll be back tomorrow, and please don’t worry, only it’s horribly difficult to explain. Whatever you think, it’s not what you’re thinking. I love you.
MARIE
P.S.—I must take the car. Have left food for you, and coffee in a thermos-bottle, in living-room. Ellen will be in tomorrow morning to get your breakfast.
He folded up the note and put it back on the bureau. Finding that he was suddenly very tired, he sat down on the bed and saw the room as a blank neatness in front of him. Then he got up and went downstairs again, turning on lights as he passed. When he examined the briefcase in the hall again, he found what he expected to find. In Cross’s book there had been twelve chapters. Now there were eleven. That dealing with Marie D’Aubray, guillotined for murder in 1861, was gone.
1 The astute reader will have noticed that the principal features of this crypt are taken from a real mausoleum at Dunecht, near Aberdeen, described by Mr. William Roughead in his admirable account, “The Dunecht Mystery,” from What Is Your Verdict?